PREFACE TO THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
1. Charles R. Beitz and Robert E. Goodin, “Introduction: Basic Rights and Beyond,” in Global Basic Rights, edited by Charles R. Beitz and Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–24, at 17–23; and Simon Caney, “Human Rights, Responsibilities, and Climate Change,” in Global Basic Rights, 227–247, at 228.
2. I have meanwhile written in passing about climate change and human rights in (1) “Changing Images of Climate Change: Human Rights and Future Generations,” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 5 (2014): 50–64; reprinted in Anna Grear and Conor Gearty, eds., Choosing a Future: The Social and Legal Aspects of Climate Change (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014), 50–64; (2) “Human Rights in the Anthropocene,” in Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, edited by Dominick A. DellaSala and Michael I. Goldstein (Oxford: Elsevier, 2018), 4:103–109; also available online as a chapter in Reference Module in Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences, Science Direct, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-409548-9.10480-4; and (3) “Last Opportunities: Future Human Rights Generate Urgent Present Duties,” in Global Policy (November 26, 2015): http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/26/11/2015/last-opportunities-future-human-rights-generate-urgent-present-duties; part of Global Policy’s e-book, Climate Change and Human Rights: The 2015 Paris Conference and the Task of Protecting People on a Warming Planet (2015), edited by Marcello di Paola and Daanika Kamal.
INTRODUCTION
1. The label “International Bill of Human Rights” very usefully groups together the Preamble and Articles 1, 55, and 56 of the Charter of the United Nations; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Although the U.S. Senate has failed to ratify the two Covenants and the Optional Protocol, they all entered into force internationally in 1976. The Carter Administration has failed even to submit to the Senate for ratification the Optional Protocol, which contains the most important mechanism for the enforcement of civil and political rights. The protocol is “optional” only in the sense that it requires separate ratification. To this grouping probably should be added the most widely ratified UN human rights treaty currently in force (once again, without United States ratification or participation): the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, in force since 1969.
On the role of the United States government in promoting within the International Bill of Human Rights the artificial division between civil and political and economic, social and cultural rights, see below, chapter 7, n. 7. On why the division is artificial, see chapter 2.
2. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, “Human Rights Policy,” April 30, 1977 (Washington: Office of Media Services, Bureau of Public Affairs, Department of State), PR 194, p. 1. The inclusion of “the right to the fulfillment of such vital needs as food, shelter, health care, and education” was re-affirmed by Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher in “Human Rights: Principle and Realism,” August 9, 1977 (Washington: Office of Media Services, Bureau of Public Affairs, Department of State), PR 374, p. 1.
3. For my account of subsistence rights, see chapter 1.
4. By focusing discussion upon positions taken by elements of the State Department I do not intend to encourage the false impression that State is the leading force in the Executive Branch on foreign policy. In recent decades the Department of Defense and National Security Advisers to the President (namely McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski) have often exerted far more influence—see, for stimulating reflections about this, Graham Allison and Peter Szanton, Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection (New York: Basic Books, 1976). State is simply the portion of the Executive Branch that makes more of its positions public than others usually do, with the result that citizens can examine them, unlike the more often secret positions pursued by the National Security Council.
5. One published account says that the legal analyses of the International Covenants, signed by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher, were “drafted” by the White House, not by the Office of Legal Advisers, and were forwarded without consultation with the Bureau of Human Rights—see Thomas M. Franck and Edward Weisband, Foreign Policy by Congress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 96. For some of the reasons why it would not be surprising if no one wanted to take responsibility for the destructive collection of reservations, understandings, and declarations that would turn Senate ratification of the Covenants into a farce, see the first section of chapter 7.
6. See Senate Comm. on Foreign Relations and House Comm. on Foreign Affairs, 96th Cong., 1st Sess., Report on Human Rights Practices in Countries Receiving U.S. Aid (Joint Comm. Print, February 8, 1979), passim. For the PQLI scores, see pp. 666–673. For a thorough discussion of the PQLI by its developer, see Morris D. Morris, Measuring the Condition of the World’s Poor: The Physical Quality of Life Index, Pergamon Policy Studies, No. 42 (New York: Pergamon Press for the Overseas Development Council, 1979).
7. See Donald M. Fraser, “Freedom and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy, No. 26 (Spring 1977), p. 144.
8. An example of this traditional way of fudging the issue is: “the right to the satisfaction of basic human needs—such as food, shelter, and essential medical care—when resources are available,” United Nations Association of the United States of America, National Policy Panel, United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights (New York: UNA-USA, 1979), p. 35. Must any effort be exerted to make resources available, or shall we just use what turns out to be left over after business as usual?
1 • SECURITY AND SUBSISTENCE
1. Obviously this is not the usual North Atlantic account of what a right is, although it incorporates, I think, what is correct in the usual accounts. Perhaps the most frequently cited philosophical discussion is the useful one in Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973), pp. 55–97. A more recent and extended account is A. I. Melden, Rights and Persons (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977). The best collection of recent English and American philosophical essays is probably Rights, edited by David Lyons (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., Inc., 1979). For a broader range of views, in less rigorous form, see Human Rights: Cultural and Ideological Perspectives, edited by Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1979). For additional references, mostly to work in English, see Rex Martin and James W. Nickel, “A Bibliography on the Nature and Foundations of Rights, 1947–1977,” Political Theory, 6:3 (August 1978), pp. 395–413. Some older but more wide-ranging bibliographies are International Human Rights: A Bibliography 1965–1969 and International Human Rights: A Bibliography 1970–1976, both edited by William Miller (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Law School, Center for Civil Rights, 1976).
2. In saying that these three features constitute “the general structure of a moral right” I do not mean that every moral right always has every one of the three. Wittgenstein, for one, has argued persuasively that we have no particular reason to expect all authentic instances of any concept to have all features—indeed, to have any one feature—in common and that what instance A shares with instance B need not be the same as what instance B shares with instance C. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Third Edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), Part I, paragraphs 66–67. What we are left with is the more realistic but more elusive notion of standard, central, or typical cases. The danger then rests in the temptation to dismiss as deviant or degenerate cases what ought to be treated as counter-examples to our general claims. We have no mechanical method for deciding what is standard and what is deviant and so must consider individual cases fairly and thoroughly, as we shall soon be trying to do.
Two important characteristics of this list of features should be emphasized. First, the list of features is, not the premises for, but the conclusion from, the detailed description of individual rights considered in the body of the book. Thus, the order of presentation is not the order of derivation. These general features were distilled from the cases of security rights, subsistence rights, and liberty rights discussed in the first three chapters. These general conclusions are presented here as a means of quickly sketching the bold outlines of what is still to be justified.
Second, most of the argument of the book depends only upon its being correct to say that all basic rights have these three features. Since the features are derived from the detailed consideration only of basic rights, it would be conceivable that basic rights were peculiar in having all three. Yet, many other rights obviously do have this same structure. So I advance the less fully justified broader claim, not merely the safer, narrower claim.
3. Feinberg, pp. 58–59. The terminology of “claim-rights” is of course from Wesley Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923).
4. Standard moral rights are, in the categories devised by Hohfeld for legal rights, claim-rights, not mere liberties. Certainly all basic rights turn out to be moral claim-rights rather than moral liberties. See chapter 2.
5. This becomes clearest in the discussion of rights to liberty in chapter 3.
6. Who exactly are the relevant people is an extremely difficult question, to which chapter 6 is devoted.
7. See chapter 2.
8. For his clearest single presentation of this analysis, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, edited by Walter Kaufmann and translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). Much, but not all, of what is interesting in Nietzsche’s account was put into the mouth of Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias.
9. Many legal claim-rights make little or no contribution to self-respect, but moral claim-rights (and the legal claim-rights based upon them) surely do.
10. Nietzsche was also conflating a number of different kinds of power/weakness. Many of today’s politically powerful, against whom people need protection, totally lack the kind of dignified power Nietzsche most admired and would certainly have incurred his cordial disgust.
11. Anyone not familiar with the real meaning of what gets called “infant mortality rates” might consider the significance of the fact that in nearby Mexico seven out of every 100 babies fail to survive infancy—see United States, Department of State, Background Notes: Mexico, Revised February 1979 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1979), p. 1. For far worse current children’s death rates still, see below, chapter 4, note 13.
12. It is controversial whether rights are claims only upon members of one’s own society or upon other persons generally. For some support for the conclusion assumed here, see chapter 6.
13. Since the enjoyment of a basic right is necessary for the enjoyment of all other rights, it is basic not only to non-basic rights but to other basic rights as well. Thus the enjoyment of the basic rights is an all-or-nothing matter. Each is necessary to the other basic ones as well as to all non-basic ones. Every right, including every basic right, can be enjoyed only if all basic rights are enjoyed. An extended discussion of a case of this mutual dependence is found in chapter 3.
At the cost of being somewhat premature it may be useful to comment here on an objection that often strikes readers at this point as being a clear counter-example to the thesis that subsistence rights are basic rights in the sense just explained. Mark Wicclair has put the objection especially forcefully for me. The arguments for the thesis have of course not yet been given and occupy much of the remainder of the chapter and, indeed, of the book.
Suppose that in a certain society people are said to enjoy a certain security right—let us say the right not to be tortured. But they do not in fact enjoy subsistence rights: food, for example, is not socially guaranteed even to people who find it impossible to nourish themselves. The thesis that subsistence rights are basic means that people cannot enjoy any other right if subsistence rights are not socially guaranteed. It follows that the people in the society in question could not actually be enjoying the right not to be tortured, because their right to adequate food is not guaranteed. But—this is the objection—it would appear that they could enjoy the right not to be tortured even though they were starving to death for lack of food they could do nothing to obtain. The objection grants that starvation is terrible. The theoretical point is, however, said to remain: starvation without torture is preferable to starvation with torture, and the right not to be tortured is still worth something even in isolation and, in particular, even in the absence of subsistence rights. Subsistence rights are, therefore, not necessary for the enjoyment of all other rights and thus not basic in the relevant sense.
But could there actually be a case of the kind brought forward as a counter-example? Could there actually be a right not to be tortured in the absence of a right to subsistence? The difficulty is that a person who had no social guarantee of, say, food and was in fact deprived of food might, without other recourse, be willing to submit to limited torture in exchange for food. In other words, what is being called a right not to be tortured is open to being undermined by the threat of doing nothing about a shortage of food. If this perverse trade of submission to torture for receipt of food were possible, it would be accurate to say that although the person may have a right not to be tortured, he cannot actually enjoy the right because he must choose between undergoing torture and undergoing starvation, or malnutrition (to make the alternative involving subsistence more like much torture: painful and damaging but not fatal). Insofar as the person has anything approximating a right not to be tortured, the “right” is a merely conditional one—conditional upon the person’s not in fact being without some necessity for subsistence for which the substance of the “right” not to be tortured could, in effect, be sold.
Three ways of trying to save the original objection come to mind. First, it might be suggested that trading the immunity to torture for the means to eat is not an instance of failing to enjoy a right, but an instance of renouncing a right. Only because one has the right not to be tortured does one have something to trade for food.
This response is fairly obviously mistaken. If one’s only hope of eating adequately is to submit to torture, one is being coerced into submitting to torture, not renouncing one’s right not to be tortured. This is a case of coercion analogous in the relevant respects to the demand, your money or your life. One is not renouncing one’s right to the money—one is being forced to surrender one’s money in order to stay alive. In prisons, where people are already deprived of the freedom of physical movement ordinarily needed for obtaining their own food, the threat to withhold food as well is in fact a common means of coercion.
Second, it could be noted that the torture-for-food exchange might simply not be available. Certainly in light of the perversity of the bargain, there might be no one in the business of supplying people with food in exchange for the privilege of torturing them. Only some sort of wealthy sadist would engage in this transaction.
Now, of course the exchange described is in fact very unlikely, as is the original situation that constitutes the counter-example. The response to the objection is as fantastical as the objection, but the objector cannot expect otherwise. (In what country are people both provided guarantees against torture and denied guarantees of food for subsistence?) But this second response misses the point. That people were not in fact undergoing torture in order to obtain food (or for any other reason) would not constitute their enjoying a right not to be tortured. Enjoying any right includes, among other things, some social guarantees. It is not merely that one does not undergo objectionable events or that one does undergo desirable events—it includes provisions having been made to see to it that the objectionable does not occur and the desirable does.
Hence, the third way to save the counter-example would be to add to it a prohibition against trading the right not to be tortured for anything else, including what was needed to meet an even more serious threat. The counter-example would have to say: one may not be tortured and one must not surrender, trade, renounce, etc. this right for anything else. This would be a weak version of something roughly like what was traditionally called inalienability, except that as traditionally understood inalienability was essential to or inherent in a right: it was thought to be somehow absolutely impossible to alienate or trade the right. In the objector’s counter-example anyone obviously could trade the right not to be tortured for something else. The best that could be done would be an exceptionless and enforceable prohibition against trading away this right. The trade would, perhaps, be illegal. We can call this an alienation-prohibition, in order to distinguish it from the traditional notion of intrinsic inalienability.
With the inclusion of the alienation-prohibition the case may be an actual counter-example, but it is difficult to tell. Possibly one is enjoying a right not to be tortured when one is not only protected against torture but also prevented from exchanging that protection for protection against other threats. As the argument of the book unfolds, two of the main contentions will be (a) that in order to enjoy any right one must be protected against the standard threats to the right and (b) that the best way to be protected against a standard threat is to have social guarantees for the absence of the threat. Thus, the way to enjoy a right to subsistence is to be guaranteed that no torture, among other things, will be used to implement an economic strategy that produces malnutrition, and the way to enjoy a right not to be tortured is to be guaranteed that no deprivations of subsistence needs like food, among other things, will be used to implement a political strategy that includes torture (not that the latter is a realistic case).
Now instead of protecting the enjoyment of one right against standard threats by also protecting the other rights the enjoyment of which includes social guarantees against the standard threats, one could conceivably “protect” one right in isolation by prohibiting the use of that right to fend off threats against which one has no guarantees because one lacks other rights. This is what is done by the right not to be tortured that includes the alienation-prohibition. But the attempted counter-example has now become quite contorted and exotic. One is being prohibited from saving one’s own life (from lack of subsistence) at a cost of pain and damage that one is willing to accept if one must. Is this an example of enjoying one right (not to be tortured) in the absence of the enjoyment of another right (subsistence)? This case is now so different from an ordinary case of enjoying a right (in which, I will contend, part of the right is social guarantees against standard threats) that it is uncertain what to say. Obviously I could not without circularity invoke what I take to be the normal and adequate conception of enjoying a right in order to judge the proffered case not to be a case of enjoying a right and therefore not a counter-example to the thesis that subsistence rights are basic. However, treating this eccentric example as a clear case would be question-begging against my view, I think. So, I leave it to the reader—and to the argument in the text.
14. It is odd that the list of “primary goods” in Rawlsian theory does not mention physical security as such. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 62 and p. 303. The explanation seems to be that security is lumped in with political participation and a number of civil liberties, including freedom of thought, of speech, of press, et al. To do this is to use “liberty” in a confusingly broad sense. One can speak intelligibly of “freedom from” almost anything bad: the child was free from fear, the cabin was free from snakes, the picnic was free from rain. Similarly, it is natural to speak of being free from assault, free from the threat of rape, etc., but this does not turn all these absences of evils into liberties. Freedom from assault, for example, is a kind of security or safety, not a kind of liberty. It may of course be a necessary condition for the exercise of any liberties, which is exactly what I shall now be arguing, but a necessary condition for the exercise of a liberty may be many things other than another kind of liberty. The most complete indication of why I believe physical security and liberty—even freedom of physical movement—need to be treated separately is chapter 3.
15. At considerable risk of encouraging unflattering comparisons I might as well note myself that in its general structure the argument here has the same form as the argument in H.L.A. Hart’s classic, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review, 64:2 (April 1955), pp. 175-91. That is, Hart can be summarized as maintaining: if there are any rights, there are rights to liberty. I am saying: if there are any rights, there are rights to security—and to subsistence. The finer structures of the arguments are of course quite different. I find Hart’s inference considerably less obvious than he did. So, evidently, do many thoughtful people in the Third and Fourth Worlds, which counts against its obviousness but not necessarily against its validity. My struggle with the place of some kinds of liberty, construed more narrowly than Hart’s, constitutes chapter 3.
16. In originally formulating this argument for treating both security and subsistence as basic rights I was not consciously following any philosopher but attempting instead to distill contemporary common sense. As many people have noted, today’s common sense tends to be yesterday’s philosophy. I was amused to notice recently the following passage from Mill, who not only gives a similar argument for security but notices and then backs away from the parallel with subsistence: “The interest involved is that of security, to everyone’s feelings the most vital of all interests. All other earthly benefits are needed by one person, not needed by another; and many of them can, if necessary, be cheerfully foregone or replaced by something else; but security no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment, since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us if we could be deprived of everything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves. Now this most indispensable of all necessaries, after physical nutriment, cannot be had unless. . . .” John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1957), p. 67 (chapter V, 14th paragraph from the end).
17. “Many people, therefore, economically dependent as they are upon their employer, hesitate to speak out not because they are afraid of getting arrested, but because they are afraid of being fired. And they are right.” Ira Glasser, “Director’s Report: You Can Be Fired for Your Politics,” Civil Liberties, No. 327 (April 1979), p. 8.
18. Exactly how and why Western liberalism has tended to overlook subsistence is another story, but consider, simply as one symptom, the fact that a standard assumption in liberal theory is that there is only moderate scarcity. This has the effect of assuming that everyone’s subsistence is taken care of. You must have your subsistence guaranteed in order to be admitted into the domain of the theory. Today this excludes from the scope of liberal theory no fewer than 1,000,000,000 people.
The figure of over one billion is generally accepted as the minimum number of desperately poor people. The U.S. government’s World Hunger Working Group, for example, gave “1.2 billion” as the number of “persons without access to safe drinking water”—see United States, White House, World Hunger and Malnutrition: Improving the U.S. Response (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 9. This is, roughly, 25% of all the people there are—and a much higher percentage of the children, since in many very poor countries most people are young.
I am not criticizing only people who call themselves “liberals” but also, for example, “neoconservatives.” For, as Michael Walzer has perceptively observed, “neoconservatives are nervous liberals, and what they are nervous about is liberalism”—see Michael Walzer, “Nervous Liberals,” New York Review of Books, 26:15 (October 11, 1979), p. 6.
19. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 40–41. Scott analyzes the “normative roots of peasant politics” (4) with subtlety and clarity, displaying a coherent and rational conceptual framework implicit in the moral consensus across several peasant societies. I do not mean to suggest, nor does Scott, that all is well in Southeast Asia. For one thing, many traditional village institutions are being eliminated by “modernizing” regimes. With Scott’s theory, compare Joel S. Migdal, Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); and Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
For defenses of the suspension of the fulfillment of subsistence rights during an indefinite development period, see Lt. Gen. Ali Moertopo, “Political and Economic Development in Indonesia in the Context of Regionalism in Southeast Asia,” Indonesian Quarterly, 6:2 (April 1978), pp. 30–47, esp. pp. 32–38; and O. D. Corpuz, “Liberty and Government in the New Society” (Quezon City: University of the Philippines, Office of the President, 1975), photocopy. For cautions from a nutritional anthropologist about the effects of U.S. aid programs on traditional societies, see Norge W. Jerome, “Nutritional Dilemmas of Transforming Economies,” in Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices, ed. by Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 275–304.
20. Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 252. On the importance for Philippine peasants of their deep belief in a right to subsistence, see pp. 252–255. The most comprehensive legal and normative analysis of economic rights in developing countries is “The International Dimensions of the Right to Development as a Human Right in Relation with Other Human Rights,” United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights, E/CN.4/1334 (35th Sess., Agenda item 8, 2 January 1979), (Geneva: Division of Human Rights, 1978).
21. I am grateful to Douglas MacLean for emphasizing the similarity between the notion toward which I am groping here and the one in Thomas M. Scanlon, “Human Rights as a Neutral Concern,” in Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy: Principles and Applications, edited by Peter G. Brown and Douglas MacLean (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1979), pp. 83–92. The Brown and MacLean volume and this volume are products of the same research effort and are designed to complement each other. On nearly every major issue discussed here, alternative views appear in Brown and MacLean, and I am to some degree indebted to the author of almost every chapter of that companion volume, including those with which I am in sharp disagreement philosophically or politically.
22. Although this admission opens a theoretical door to a certain amount of “relativism,” I suspect the actual differences across societies in the standard preventable threats are much less than they conceivably might be. Compare Barrington Moore’s thesis that although differences in conceptions of happiness are great and important, virtually everyone agrees upon the “miseries”—Barrington Moore, Jr., Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and Upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), especially chapter I, and Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1978). Here, as in many other places, philosophical analysis and political analysis need each other.
The unavoidable mixture of the analytic and the empirical in an element like standard threats is obviously difficult to characterize with any precision. On the one hand, it is clearly part of the meaning of a right that the right-holder may insist that other people take measures to protect the enjoyment of the substance of the right against ordinary, non-inevitable threats—this much is analytic. But which threats are pervasive, which are serious, and which can feasibly be resisted must be discovered from particular situations. Naturally, what is, for example, feasible is a function of how much of the available resources are devoted to the task, as chapter 4 will emphasize, and that is a heavily value-laden question, not a mere question of efficiency to be left to the economists. So we can draw no neat line between aspects that require philosophical argument and aspects that require economic and political investigation.
23. The coherence of the account of the general structure of a moral right and the account of a basic right with each other is one consideration in favor of both, although coherence is, needless to say, not enough. I am grateful to Charles R. Beitz for perceptively pressing me to make these underlying connections clearer.
Since fulfilling any one basic right involves creating safeguards for the enjoyment of the substance of that basic right against the other standard threats that are the respective concerns of the other basic rights, no basic right can be completely fulfilled until all basic rights are fulfilled. See note 13 above and, for an extended example, chapter 3, and especially note 14. It would appear that just as (and, because?) deprivations of rights tend to be systematically interrelated, the fulfillment of at least the basic rights also comes in a single package.
2 • CORRELATIVE DUTIES
1. See the Introduction.
2. For a forceful re-affirmation of this view in the current political context (and further references), see Hugo Adam Bedau, “Human Rights and Foreign Assistance Programs,” in Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. by Peter G. Brown and Douglas MacLean (Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books, 1979), pp. 29–44. Also see Charles Frankel, Human Rights and Foreign Policy, Headline Series No. 241 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1978), especially pp. 36–49, where Frankel advanced a “modest list of fundamental rights” that explicitly excluded economic rights as “dangerously utopian.” A version of the general distinction has recently been re-affirmed by Thomas Nagel—see “Equality,” in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 114–115. An utterly unrealistic but frequently invoked version of the distinction is in Maurice Cranston, What Are Human Rights? (London: The Bodley Head, 1973), chapter VIII. An interesting attempt to show that the positive/negative distinction is compatible with economic rights is John Langan, “Defining Human Rights: A Revision of the Liberal Tradition,” Working Paper (Washington: Woodstock Theological Center, 1979). For a provocative and relevant discussion of “negative responsibility” (responsibility for what one fails to prevent), see Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism: For & Against (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 93 ff.
3. Naturally my use of the same argument for the basic status of both security and subsistence is at least an indirect challenge to (1) (b). No question is raised here, however, about (1) (a): the thesis that subsistence and security are sharply distinguishable. People who should be generally sympathetic to my fundamental thesis that subsistence rights are basic rights, do sometimes try to reach the same conclusion by the much shorter seeming route of denying that security and subsistence are importantly different from each other. For example, it is correctly observed that both security and subsistence are needed for survival and then maintained that both are included in a right to survival, or right to life. Though I am by no means hostile to this approach, it does have three difficulties that I believe can be avoided by my admittedly somewhat more circuitous path of argument. First, it is simply not correct that one cannot maintain a clear and useful distinction between security and subsistence, as, in fact, I hope to have done up to this point. Second, arguments for a general right to life that includes subsistence rights appear to need some premise to the effect that the right to life entails rights to at least some of the means of life. Thus, they face the same “weakness of too much strength”—straining credulity by implying more than most people are likely to be able to believe—that we tried to avoid at the end of chapter 1. A right-to-the-means-of-life argument might be able to skirt the problem equally well by using a notion of a standard threat to life, analogous to our notion of a standard threat to the enjoyment of rights, but this alternative tack seems, at best, no better off. Third, the concept of a right to life is now deeply infected with ambiguities concerning whether it is a purely negative right, a purely positive right, or, as I shall soon be maintaining with regard to both security and subsistence, an inseparable mixture of positive and negative elements. The appeal for many people of a right to life seems to depend, however, upon its being taken to be essentially negative, while it can fully include subsistence rights only if it has major positive elements.
4. I think one can often show the implausibility of an argument by an exhaustive statement of all the assumptions it needs. I have previously attempted this in the case of one of John Rawls’s arguments for the priority of liberty—see “Liberty and Self-Respect,” Ethics, 85:3 (April 1975), pp. 195–203.
5. I have given a summary of the argument against 3 and arguments against thinking that either the right to a fair trail or the right not to be tortured are negative rights in “Rights in the Light of Duties,” in Brown and MacLean, pp. 65–81. I have also argued directly against what is here called 2b and briefly introduced the account of duties presented in the final sections of this chapter. My goal, which I have no illusions about having attained, has been to do as definitive a job on positive and negative rights as Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr. did on positive and negative liberty in his splendid article, “Negative and Positive Freedom,” Philosophical Review, 76:3 (July 1967), pp. 312–334.
6. See note 3 above.
7. Elsewhere I have briefly queried the moral significance of the action/omission distinction—see the essay cited in note 5 above. For a fuller discussion, see Judith Lichtenberg, “On Being Obligated to Give Aid: Moral and Political Arguments,” Diss., City University of New York, 1978.
8. In FY 1975 in the United States the cost of the “criminal justice system” was $17 billion, or $71 per capita, New York Times, July 21, 1977, p. A3. In several countries that year the total annual income was less than $71 per capita. Obviously such isolated statistics prove nothing, but they are suggestive. One thing they suggest is that adequate provisions for this supposedly negative right would not necessarily be less costly than adequate provisions for some rights supposed to be positive. Nor is it evident that physical security does any better on what Frankel called the test of being “realistically deliverable” (45) and Cranston called “the test of practicability” (66). On Cranston’s use of the latter, see chapter 4.
9. “To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of”—John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1957), p. 66 (chapter V, 14th paragraph from the end).
10. This is not a point about ordinary language, in which there is obviously a significant difference between “leave me alone” and “protect me against people who will not leave me alone.” My thesis is that people who are not already grinding axes for minimal government will naturally and reasonably think in terms of enjoying a considerable degree of security, will want to have done whatever within reason is necessary, and will recognize that more is necessary than refraining campaigns—campaigns urging self-restraint upon would-be murderers, muggers, rapists, et al. I am of course not assuming that existing police and penal institutions are the best forms of social guarantees for security; I am assuming only that more effective institutions would probably be at least equally complex and expensive.
11. Therefore, as we shall see below, the complete fulfillment of a subsistence right may involve not the actual provision of any aid at all but only the performance of duties to avoid depriving and to protect against deprivation.
12. The literature on underdeveloped countries in fact abounds in actual cases that have the essential features of the so-called hypothetical case, and I have simply presented a stylized sketch of a common pattern. Most anecdotes are in the form of “horror stories” about transnational corporations switching land out of the production of the food consumed by the local poor. See, for example, Robert J. Ledogar, Hungry for Profits: U.S. Food and Drug Multinationals in Latin America (New York: IDOC, 1976), pp. 92–98 (Ralston Purina in Colombia) and Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Müller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 182 (carnations in Colombia). For a gargantuan case on a regional scale involving cattle-ranching, see Shelton H. Davis, Victims of the Miracle: Development and the Indians of Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). To a considerable extent the long-term development policy of Mexico for at least thirty of the last forty years has followed this basic pattern of depriving the rural poor of food for subsistence for the sake of greater agricultural production of other crops—see the extremely careful and balanced study by Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara, Modernizing Mexican Agriculture: Socioeconomic Implications of Technological Change 1940–1970, Report No. 76.5 (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1976); and Judith Adler Hellman, Mexico in Crisis (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1978), chapter 3. For a sophisticated theoretical analysis of some of the underlying dynamics, see Jeffery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975), which has case studies of Angola, Peru, and Vietnam.
13. That is, they are conceptually distinct; whether this distinction makes any moral difference is another matter. See above, note 7, and the distinctions at the beginning of this chapter.
14. The increasingly frequent and facile appeal to “overpopulation” as a reason not to prevent preventable starvation is considered in chapter 4.
15. This much of the analysis is derived from the following important article: Onora O’Neill, “Lifeboat Earth,” in World Hunger and Moral Obligation, edited by William Aiken and Hugh La Follette (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1977), pp. 140–164. I return to discussion of the causal complexity of such cases below, pp. 58–60.
16. For example, land-use laws might prohibit removing prime agricultural land from food production. Alternatively, land might be allowed to be used in the manner most beneficial to the national balance of payments with tax laws designed to guarantee compensating transfers to increase the purchasing power of the villagers (e.g., food stamps), etc. I return in chapter 5 to the question of how to apportion the duties to prevent such social disasters.
17. There are of course non-human threats to both security and subsistence, like floods, as well. And we expect a minimally adequate society also to make arrangements to prevent, to control, or to minimize the ill effects of floods and other destructive natural forces. However, for an appreciation of the extent to which supposedly natural famines are the result of inadequate social arrangements, see Richard G. Robbins, Famine in Russia 1891–92 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); and Michael F. Lofchie, “Political and Economic Origins of African Hunger,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 13:4 (December 1975), pp. 551–567. As Lofchie says: “The point of departure for a political understanding of African hunger is so obvious it is almost always overlooked: the distinction between drought and famine. . . . To the extent that there is a connection between drought and famine, it is mediated by the political and economic arrangements of a society. These can either minimize the human consequences of drought or accentuate its effects” (553). For a demonstration that the weather and other natural factors actually played fairly minor roles in the Great Bengal Famine, see the analysis by Amartya Sen cited in note 17 to chapter 4, and chapter 4 generally. To treat the absence of adequate social arrangements as a cause of a famine precipitated by a natural event like a drought or a flood, as these writers and I do, is to assume that it is reasonable to have expected the absent arrangements to have been present.
18. See note 12 above.
19. See below, chapter 7, notes 26–28.
20. Richard R. Fagen, “The Carter Administration and Latin America: Business as Usual?” Foreign Affairs, 57:3 (America and the World 1978), pp. 663–667. These policies are very similar to those imposed as conditions for loans by the International Monetary Fund. See William Goodfellow, “The IMF and Basic Human Needs Strategies,” Paper prepared for Seminar on “Basic Human Needs: Moral and Political Implications of Policy Alternatives,” Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University, February 26, 1979; mimeo., p. 4.
With Fagen’s analysis, compare Guillermo A. O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism, Politics of Modernization Series, No. 9 (Berkeley: University of California, Institute of International Studies, 1973); Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, expanded and emended version (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 177–216; and Albert O. Hirschman, “The Turn to Authoritarianism in Latin America and the Search for Its Economic Determinants,” in David Collier, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 61–98. Also see Steven Jackson, Bruce Russett, et al., “An Assessment of Empirical Research on Dependencia,” Latin American Research Review, 14:3 (1979), pp. 7–28.
21. On whether an adequate definition can be literally exceptionless, see note 2 to chapter 1.
22. I take the need for the qualification “not necessary to the satisfaction of one’s own basic rights” to be fairly obvious. However admirable self-sacrifice may be, it is surely not a basic duty owed to people generally, and the surrender of one’s right to subsistence—or security—would in many circumstances constitute a literal sacrifice of oneself, that is, one’s life. Unfortunately, the content of a duty does not dictate the identity of its bearers. Chapter 5 discusses how to assign in a reasonable way the responsibility for fulfilling various duties.
23. How to bring transnational corporations under some constraints in order to prevent great social harms, like violations of basic rights, is one of our great political challenges. See the discussion in chapter 7 of recommendation (4) and the relevant notes.
24. I am, of course, not proposing that we start calling it murder, but I am proposing that we acknowledge the parallels and act in appropriately parallel ways.
25. Without becoming anti-intellectual, or even atheoretical, we theorists might remember that a crystal-clear abstract distinction may not only have no positive practical value but may sometimes contribute to vice. Writing about an entirely different matter, Barrie A. Paskins has put the general point eloquently: “We can imagine and describe cases in which we would think torture justified and unjustified. We can state the grounds on which we are making the discrimination. But what we cannot do is this: we cannot provide for ourselves, or for those who must act for us in real situations, any way of making our notional distinctions in reality. What might be claimed about the imaginary example is not that something significantly analogous could not occur but that in reality we cannot enable those who must act to recognize the case for what it is and other cases, by contrast, for what they are. In a real situation we can never be certain that the case in hand is of this kind rather than another. A too vivid imagination blinds us to the dust of war that drifts into the interrogation centre.” Barrie A. Paskins, “What’s Wrong with Torture?” British Journal of International Studies, 2 (1976), p. 144. I think this is a profound methodological point with strong implications concerning the now virtually incorrigible habit among moral and political philosophers of relying upon imaginary cases and concerning the “strict compliance” situations and “ideal theory” discussed by John Rawls and Kantians generally. I am trying to develop the methodological point in an essay with the working title, “Extreme Cases.”
26. On the rationality of peasants, see James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), chapters 1 and 2.
27. See note 12 above.
28. I am indebted to John Langan for having emphasized this point. For a different argument, see his paper cited in note 2 above, p. 25.
29. For the classic account, see Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press for the Association of Asian Studies, 1963), chapters 4 and 5. Although various aspects of Geertz’s analysis are naturally no longer accepted, the main points relevant here still stand.
3 • LIBERTY
1. The classic justification for prescribing the “trade-off” of liberty for development is Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 1–92. Compare Samuel P. Huntington and Joan M. Nelson, No Easy Choice: Political Participation in Developing Countries (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). A perceptive analysis of the normative assumptions of Huntington’s theory is: Mark Kesselman, “Order or Movement? The Literature of Political Development as Ideology,” World Politics, 26:1 (October 1973), pp. 139–154.
For a lively critique exposing the naiveté of seven of the common arguments in favor of making the trade-off, and for further references see Robert E. Goodin, “The Development-Rights Trade-Off: Some Unwarranted Economic and Political Assumptions,” Universal Human Rights, 1:2 (April–June 1979), pp. 31–42. For a recent protest against the “trade-off,” see Sidney Liskofsky, “Human Rights Minus Liberty?” Worldview, 21:7–8 (July/August 1978), pp. 26 and 35–36.
2. Jahangir Amuzegar, “Rights, and Wrongs,” New York Times, January 29, 1978.
3. Jose W. Diokno, untitled lecture, International Council of Amnesty International, Cambridge, September 21, 1978, pp. 11–12, mimeo.
4. Goodin, p. 31n. The Rawlsian reference is of course to A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), Section 82. My own suspicion is that Rawlsian theory is especially congenial to the notion of exchanges of liberty for economic growth because the Rawlsian conceptual framework artificially separates liberty and the value of liberty. Since the value of liberty is determined by economic factors like subsistence, which are thought to be fairly cleanly separable from liberty itself (whatever that would be), it is easier to believe that liberty and the material goods that are treated as contributing to the value of liberty are sufficiently distinct from each other that one might be traded for the other. I have suggested this point previously by observing that Rawlsian theory encourages a treatment of primary goods that is “very mechanical and rather like trading marbles for tennis balls”; see “The Current Fashions: Trickle-Downs by Arrow and Close-Knits by Rawls,” Journal of Philosophy, 71:11 (June 13, 1974), p. 327. The tendency to separate the inseparable is, I believe, an almost irresistible force flowing from the distorting atomism at the heart of liberalism.
5. See above, p. 19.
6. This chapter is intended to be, among other things, a reply to the Rawlsian doctrine of the priority of liberty, as it is normally understood. But this does not mean that I will argue that liberty is secondary—only that liberty has no priority over subsistence, security, and any other basic rights. For a decisive internal argument against the doctrine of the priority of liberty, see Norman Daniels, “Equal Liberty and Unequal Worth of Liberty,” in Reading Rawls: Critical Studies of A Theory of Justice, edited by Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 253–281.
7. It is for that kind of argument that one turns to the classics of liberalism like John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, although not to liberalism only, as provocatively demonstrated in Steven Lukes, Individualism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
8. For accounts of the little-discussed forms of participation in the People’s Republic of China, see Marc Blecher, “Consensual Politics in Rural Chinese Communities: The Mass Line in Theory and Practice,” Modern China, 5:1 (January 1979), pp. 105–126; John P. Burns, “The Election of Production Team Cadres in Rural China: 1958–74,” China Quarterly, No. 74 (June 1978), pp. 273–296; and Victor C. Falkenheim, “Political Participation in China,” Problems of Communism, 27:3 (May-June 1978), pp. 18–32. For a review of the development literature, see John M. Cohen, Gladys Culagovski, Norman T. Uphoff, and Diane Wolf, Participation at the Local Level: A Working Bibliography (Ithaca: Cornell University, Center for International Studies, Rural Development Committee, 1978); and Norman T. Uphoff and John M. Cohen, The Feasibility and Application of Rural Development Participation: A State of the Art Paper, Rural Development Committee, Monograph No. 2 (Ithaca: Cornell University, Center for International Studies, 1978). For other suggestions about the relation between subsistence and participation, see Donald Curtis et al., Popular Participation in Decision-Making and the Basic Needs Approach to Development: Methods, Issues and Emergencies, World Employment Programme Working Paper (WEP 2-32/WP 12) (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 1978).
9. See Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 67–71. As she notes, Pateman is here following Sidney Verba. Also see Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
10. In other words, this argument does not in itself establish, for example, a need for democratization of the workplace, as opposed to more indirect controls over one’s own work. For one brief point about economic institutions, see the discussion of recommendation (4) in chapter 7.
11. Charles Frankel, Human Rights and Foreign Policy, Headline Series No. 241 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1978), p. 45. Frankel’s second test was mentioned in note 8 to chapter 2. Thomas Nagel invokes “a kind of unanimity requirement,” which means that “each of us must limit our actions to a range that is not unacceptable to anyone else in certain respects.” See “Equality,” in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 114 and 115 respectively. I assume, however, that this unanimity is a Kantian hypothetical unanimity not incompatible with the general point in the text. It would surely not be sufficient to prevent an action from being the violation of someone’s right that the person did not in fact find the action unacceptable.
12. For a sensitive and balanced account of some traditional Asian arrangements for subsistence, and what happened when they failed, see James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
13. I do not mean, of course, that moral beliefs can be shown to be false by exactly the same methods as any other kind of beliefs. For some stimulating reflections on what is actually a very long story, see Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). This little book is also relevant to the remarks in the succeeding paragraph.
14. Full consideration of this point in the case of liberty will greatly strengthen the general argument for taking correlative duties to be necessary constituents of rights. See above, pp. 54–55. Indeed, this chapter as a whole is probably the best explanation I have been able to give of why moral rights normally involve correlative duties and how those duties in turn involve other basic rights—why, in short, there must be a system of basic rights if there are to be any rights at all. The importance of this systematic character of rights first came clear to me in a conversation with Drew Christiansen, although I do not think he would characterize it in the same way.
15. For a full account, see Richard Millett, Guardians of the Dynasty: A History of the U.S.-Created Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua and the Somoza Family (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1977). Brief references are in Karen DeYoung, “Somoza’s Nicaragua,” Washington Post, October 16, 1977, pp. A1 and A30; and Alan Riding, “Respectable Rebels Threaten Somoza Dynasty,” New York Times, January 29, 1978, p. E4. The overthrow of Somoza by his subjects and the “profoundly interventionist and self-defeating” Carter/Brzezinski policy during his final months, are recorded in Richard R. Fagen, “Dateline Nicaragua: The End of The Affair,” Foreign Policy, No. 36 (Fall 1979), pp. 178–191.
16. See Political Imprisonment in South Africa, An Amnesty International Report (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1977), pp. 7–36; and Albie Sachs, Justice in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
17. See Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Psychiatric Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
18. This is not without its own difficulties, of course, on which see Bruce Ennis and Loren Siegel, The Rights of Mental Patients, revised edition, American Civil Liberties Union Handbook (New York: Avon Books, 1978).
19. The definitive study of the Chinese program is Thomas P. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). On U.S. conscription see Robert K. Fullinwider, “Some Issues about Conscription,” Working Paper (College Park: Center for Philosophy and Public Policy, 1980), photocopy.
20. Issues about the right to emigrate, the right of asylum, and other related matters are very important, but require separate treatment because of the complexities introduced by travel that crosses national boundaries. These will be treated in two volumes I am co-editing with Peter G. Brown for the Center for Philosophy and Public Policy under the working titles, Boundaries: National Autonomy and Its Limits and The Border That Joins: Mexican Migrants and U.S. Responsibility.
21. I hope that it is not necessary to say that ordinary prisons housing political prisoners bear little resemblance to this idyllic picture. Under the Marcos regime Philippine prisons, for example, are so terrible that prisoners who can afford to are willing to pay bribes in order to be used as houseboys by Philippine army officers—see Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, Association of Major Religious Superiors, Political Detainees of the Philippines, Quarterly Report, 4:2 (April–June 1979), “Mindanao Area,” pp. 43–44. This practice of the Philippine military is a form of slavery, which, needless to say, violates even the laws of war. The Carter/Brzezinski foreign policy has included lavish support for the Marcos regime—see Henry Kamm, “Ex-President of Philippines Attacks Carter Over U.S. Support of Marcos,” New York Times, September 18, 1979, p. A6.
In Indonesian prisons under the Suharto regime neither ordinary criminals nor political prisoners are guaranteed any food they do not pay for, except that ordinary criminals who can be trusted to return are often released for a few hours in the evening to steal food for themselves—interview with Yap Thiam-Hien, Indonesian member, International Commission of Jurists, June 28, 1979, Bellagio, Italy. On Indonesia especially, compare the grossly misleading report by the U.S. Department of State—Senate Comm. on Foreign Relations and House Comm. on Foreign Affairs, 96th Cong., 1st Sess., Report on Human Rights Practices in Countries Receiving U.S. Aid (Joint Comm. Print, February 8, 1979), pp. 360–363 and 364–365. State Department reporting on Indonesia has since its beginning consistently been evasive to the point of distortion; see, for example, House Comm. on International Relations, 94th Cong., 2d Sess., Human Rights and U.S. Policy: Argentina, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Peru, and the Philippines (Comm. Print, December 31, 1976), pp. 12–17; and compare the sources in note 28 to chapter 7. On the general problem of the adequacy of information for policy-making, see John Salzberg, “Monitoring Human Rights Violations: How Good Is the Information?” in Brown and MacLean, especially pp. 178–181 on State Department testimony and reports.
22. One of John Rawls’s two main arguments for the priority of liberty would actually establish the importance only of the solitary intellectual liberties, and not all the other liberties to which he would also like to assign first rank. See Rawls, pp. 205–211. Rawls concedes: “I have tried to show, by taking liberty of conscience as an example, how justice as fairness provides strong arguments for equal liberty. The same kind of reasoning applies, I believe, in other cases, though not always with similar force” (209). This is, I believe, another major difficulty for Rawlsian theory. For an analysis of the other main Rawlsian argument for the priority of liberty, see Henry Shue, “Liberty and Self-Respect,” Ethics, 85:3 (April 1975), pp. 195–203.
23. Unfortunately they may also be the fate of the non-arbitrarily imprisoned as well. Once again the issue of the other rights of criminals quite properly deprived of their freedom of movement is important but so complex as to require separate treatment. As the succeeding paragraph makes clear, deep problems haunt any attempt to guarantee effective rights to prisoners deprived wrongly or rightly of their freedom of movement because of the systematic interrelationship of rights and of the protection for one right with another right. One can hope that where people are put into prison in less arbitrary ways, they will be treated less arbitrarily while there. But there is no necessary connection.
24. See the studies cited in note 16 above and compare John Dugard, Human Rights and the South African Legal Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). I do not intend to imply that the Botha regime is now better.
25. Contemporary North Atlantic philosophers tend, I believe, seriously to underestimate how misleading about actual cases the consideration of imaginary cases often is, in part because imaginary cases are often extreme, exceptional, or both. Also see note 25 to chapter 2.
26. Among the many “other things” that are not equal, but are also not within the scope of the present argument, are the relative tendencies of participatory and non-participatory governments to chronic corruption and the relative merits of participatory and non-participatory societies considered in terms of very appealing moral ideals. I have restricted myself here to only the argument for liberty that is exactly parallel to my argument for security and subsistence. That argument by itself seems to me to be strong enough. On participation as an ideal see the books by Lukes and Pateman cited above, and the references there.
27. Popular writers often present the People’s Republic of China since liberation in 1949 as an obvious counter-example allegedly constituting a form of non-participatory economic development. This is a complex case, needless to say, but the force of the PRC as a counter-example often depends upon wildly exaggerated accounts of the violence during the transition period. The supposed levels of violence are then taken to be evidence that the process was totally coercive and non-participatory. For a careful and balanced assessment of the extent of violence, see Benedict Stavis, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 23–32. As Stavis notes, some of the more exaggerated early accounts were accepted by the New York Times, which went on to offer the racist observation: “It is an axiom that life is cheap in crowded and undeveloped countries” (Stavis, p. 27, n. 10). Although the violence tends to be overestimated, the participation tends to be underestimated—see n. 8 above. For a more general analysis of the forces at work in the early years after the revolution, see Vivienne Shue, Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development Toward Socialism, 1949–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
4 • REALISM AND RESPONSIBILITY
1. Those who would prefer, or feel compelled, not to take seriously any economic rights, even basic rights to subsistence, sometimes take comfort in one possible interpretation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 2, Section 1, which says that every State party to the covenant will “take steps . . . with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized. . . .” If one ignores the much tighter language of Article 1, Section 2, which insists that “in no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence,” one can construe Article 2, Section 1, as saying, in effect: “take your time, even about subsistence.” Without debating the intention (or the wisdom) of the drafters of the Covenants in including this “gradualism” clause in this Covenant but not in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Were civil and political rights to be fulfilled instantaneously?), I think we can say that if the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights does not mean that supreme priority is to go to the fulfillment of subsistence rights, then it is more like a list of wishes than a bill of rights and does not deserve much attention, unless it is in fact unrealistic to make the social guarantee of subsistence anything more than a somewhat dreamy distant hope.
2. The most dynamic academic advocate of this position has probably been Garrett Hardin, several of whose main recent essays are collected along with related essays by others, in Managing the Commons, edited by Garrett Hardin and John Baden (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977). For philosophical discussion of some of the issues involved see Ethics and Population, edited by Michael D. Bayles (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1976). A less good collection, because so many contributors uncritically accept the terms of the question as set by Hardin, is Lifeboat Ethics: The Moral Dilemmas of World Hunger, edited by George R. Lucas, Jr. and Thomas Ogletree (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976). Also see the Sikora and Barry volume cited below in note 10.
This view also has powerful advocates and opponents in the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Congress.
3. Why always other people? Why don’t more people conclude that, for example, they ought to commit suicide by fasting, or refrain from having children of their own? The answer is, of course, that they have a perfect right to continue to live, to eat, and to have children if they want to. But if they have this right, why don’t others?
4. Blaming the victims in this way is at the other extreme from the searching for villains that Charles Frankel feared would result from the acknowledgment of any economic rights: “Corruption, callousness, a desire to maintain positions of privilege, are surely among the causes of poor countries’ problems. But the language of rights gives them excessive attention. It simplifies and obscures the underlying issues. It suggests that peoples’ [sic] deprivations are due in the main neither to the scarcities of nature nor to their own habits and preferences but to the misdeeds of others. It encourages a search for villains, and an impatience with the slow ways of freedom.” See Charles Frankel, Human Rights and Foreign Policy, Headline Series No. 241 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1978), p. 41.
Frankel’s view depends upon an empirical assumption about the main causes of deprivation, not upon any strictly philosophical point. Indeed, this is a very clear example of how moral analysis depends upon correct social analysis. And there is considerable evidence “that peoples’ deprivations are due in the main neither to the scarcities of nature nor to their own habits and preferences. . . .” It does not follow, however, that the deprivations must then be due “to the misdeeds of others,” taken to be “villains.” The correct one of several possible alternative explanations seems to me to be inadequate social institutions (local, national, and international) that do not provide the kinds of social guarantees like grain reserves against standard threats like crop failures that basic rights justify. I am, of course, making an alternative empirical assumption to Frankel’s about the main causes of deprivation. For supporting evidence see the studies cited in chapter 2 and later in this chapter. For an excellent brief summary of the causes of malnutrition see Cheryl Christensen, “World Hunger: A Structural Approach,” International Organization, 32:3 (Summer 1978), Special Issue: The Global Political Economy of Food, ed. by Raymond F. Hopkins and Donald J. Puchala, pp. 745–774; also see her forthcoming book on the international political economy of food (New York: Free Press).
If relying upon “the slow ways of freedom” includes relying upon the free market in food, chronic malnutrition will persist indefinitely—see Christensen; Lyle Schertz, “World Needs: Shall the Hungry Be With Us Always?” in Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices, ed. by Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 13–35, esp. pp. 30–34; and Donald J. Puchala and Raymond F. Hopkins, “Toward Innovation in the Global Food Regime,” International Organization, 32:3 (Summer 1978), pp. 855–868.
5. Garrett Hardin is certainly committed to a challenge that is at least this strong. See Hardin’s essays “Living on a Lifeboat,” in Hardin and Baden, pp. 261–279; and “Carrying Capacity as an Ethical Concept,” in Lucas and Ogletree, pp. 120–137.
6. Henry Shue, “Torture,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 7:2 (Winter 1978), pp. 124–143. On artificial examples, see esp. pp. 141–142.
7. Richard D. Lyons, “World Hunger to Impact on U.S.,” The Journal of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies, 4:3 (Autumn 1979), 57–65. The quotations, in the order quoted, are from pp. 65, 63, 61, and 57; emphases in the original. Lyons, who is described by The Journal as “national science correspondent for The New York Times,” expects “pandemic famine” (57) and “the slow etiolation of American prosperity” (62). An A.I.D. press release attributes to the Administrator of A.I.D., John J. Gilligan, the simplistic opinion that “by 1985 a global food deficit of one hundred million tons is anticipated, directly attributable to population growth outstripping agricultural production” (emphasis added)—“World Population Growth, Food Shortages Adversely Affect Americans, Says Gilligan,” A.I.D. News, AID-79-4 (Washington: Office of Public Affairs, A.I.D., 1979), p. 3. Every study I have ever seen indicates that food production—much agriculture is not food—in the poor countries has generally kept pace with population growth. On the future, see Food Needs of Developing Countries: Projections of Production and Consumption to 1990 (Washington: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1977), which contains careful country-by-country projections.
8. I am not saying that specific people have raised one but not the other of the specific versions I am distinguishing. Analysis is often the key to refutation, and I hope that people who carefully consider the alternative versions of the diffuse initial worry will, for the reasons I will be giving, decline each.
9. International issues are the subject of chapter 6.
10. On inter-generational (temporal) and international (spatial) questions, respectively, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 284–298 and 377–382. More recent work on inter-generational questions includes Brian M. Barry, “Justice Between Generations,” in Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of H.L.A. Hart, edited by P.M.S. Hacker and J. Raz (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 268–284; and Obligations to Future Generations, edited by R. I. Sikora and Brian Barry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), especially the essay by Barry. The questions of inter-temporal allocation, as they apply to U.S. energy policy, are being analyzed in a study directed by Douglas MacLean—see his perceptive essay, “Benefit-Cost Analysis, Future Generations, and Energy Policy: A Survey of the Moral Issues,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, No. 31 (Spring 1980), forthcoming.
A recent work that I have regrettably not been able to take into account here, but that promises certainly to make a major contribution on the international questions, is Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
11. Contrary to what may appear to be common sense, this assumed prediction is by no means clearly true. Much depends, as we shall see below, upon the effects upon fertility rates of any lowered infant mortality rates that may result from fulfilling subsistence needs. Compare Michael F. Brewer, “Slowing Population Growth with Food Aid,” in Brown and Shue, pp. 259–274; and Beverly Winikoff, “Nutrition, Population, and Health: Some Implications for Policy,” Science, 200 (26 May 1978), pp. 895–902.
12. “One-half of child deaths are in some way attributable to malnutrition,” United Nations, Food and Agricultural Organization, “Assessment of the World Food Situation: Present and Future,” E/Conf. 65/3, United Nations World Food Conference, November 1974, p. 67. This figure is accepted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s leading specialist on the question, Lyle Schertz—see “World Needs: Shall the Hungry Be With Us Always?” in Brown and Shue, p. 20 and p. 32. Also see A.K.M. Alauddin Chowdhury and Lincoln C. Chen, “The Interaction of Nutrition, Infection, and Mortality during Recent Food Crises in Bangladesh,” Food Research Institute Studies, 16:2 (1977), pp. 47–61.
13. Alan Berg, The Nutrition Factor: Its Role in National Development (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1973), Table B-1, p. 222. The age by which the same percentage of the U.S. population will have died as have already died in Guinea by the age of 5 is 68 (Egypt, 61; Guatemala, 57). This might be called inequality in life prospects. Also see Shlomo Reutlinger and Marcelo Selowsky, Malnutrition and Poverty: Magnitude and Policy Options, World Bank Staff Occasional Papers, No. 23 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press for the World Bank, 1976), pp. 29–38 (analysis of Calcutta Food Survey).
14. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, chapter 4, “Rebellion.”
15. See Maurice Cranston, What Are Human Rights? (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1973), chapter VIII.
16. Cranston, pp. 66–67. Also see note 8 to chapter 2.
17. All references to the Bengal famine, which may have been the worst of this century, rest upon a brilliant article that establishes, among other conclusions, that the more fundamental problem was not the quantity of food, but the level of wages: Amartya Sen, “Starvation and Exchange Entitlements: A General Approach and Its Application to the Great Bengal Famine,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1:1 (1977), pp. 33–59. The Governor’s comment is quoted on p. 52. It is fascinating to compare Sen’s analysis of Bengal in 1943 with Schertz’s analysis of the global situation now—see the Schertz article in Brown and Shue, cited in note 4 above. To put it crudely, Sen and Schertz agree that levels of income, not quantities of food, are the dominant obstacle to adequate nutrition. Famines tend to be social, not natural, disasters.
One of the unwritten chapters of 20th-century history concerns what might be called the Holocaust of Neglect in Asia. While 6 million Jews were being executed in Europe, well over 6 million Asians were being allowed to starve in Asia. Why the Holocaust of Neglect was also allowed to happen (for example, the relative importance of the World War), and why these appalling tragedies have gone virtually unnoticed in the North Atlantic scholarly community, would make a fascinating but sobering tale, I think. For 1943–1945 the toll was over 3 million Bengalis in British India—see the study by Amartya Sen, and further references there; over 2 million in French Indochina—see Tran Van Mai, “Who Committed This Crime?” in Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French, Ngo Vinh Long, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973); and 2 or 3 million Honanese in Nationalist China—see Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder Out of China (New York: William Sloane Associates, Inc., 1946), Chapter II, “The Honan Famine.”
As this book goes to press, the widows and orphans of Kampuchea eat the last bark from the last trees and sink toward their places in the fourth historic famine in Asia since 1940. This time the major powers lack the excuse that they were having a war among themselves. The list of “statesmen,” governments, and armies who have created this famine—if ever a famine is not natural but man-made, this is it—is long and illustrious. But anyone doubting that the U.S. played a role might look at William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
For a description of the subsequent step in the decimation of the Kampucheans, see François Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978). A recent, understated account is in Murray Hiebert and Linda Gibson Hiebert, “Famine in Kampuchea: Politics of a Tragedy,” Indochina Issues, No. 4 (Washington: Center for International Policy, 1979). The many-sided debate about the Vietnamese conquest of Kampuchea, the effect of the fighting in deepening the famine, and the roles being played by the major powers is only beginning at this point. Useful articles, including some giving the Vietnamese point of view, are in Southeast Asia Chronicle, No. 68, “Vietnam-China War” (December 1979), and in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 11:4 (October-December 1979), pp. 2–25.
18. Thomas Nagel, “Poverty and Food: Why Charity Is Not Enough,” in Brown and Shue, pp. 54–62.
19. Once again, the moral argument depends upon the causal analysis. An earlier attempt to criticize Nagel’s, and Peter Singer’s, argument on this point somewhat differently is, I think, less clear—see Henry Shue, “Distributive Criteria for Development Assistance,” in Brown and Shue, pp. 313–314.
20. This is now generally accepted, as are most of the points in this paragraph. For a clear argument and extensive references, see John Os-good Field and Mitchel B. Wallerstein, “Beyond Humanitarianism: A Developmental Perspective on American Food Aid,” in Brown and Shue, pp. 234–258. The Field/Wallerstein diagnosis is separable from their prescription, which is more optimistic about U.S. A.I.D. than I am. Also see United States, Department of State, World Population: The Silent Explosion, Bulletin Reprint, DOS Publication 8956 (October 1978), pp. 10–14; Radha Sinha, Food and Poverty (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976); Christensen; Winikoff; Berg; Reutlinger and Selowsky; James E. Kocher, “Socioeconomic Development and Fertility Change in Rural Africa,” Food Research Institute Studies, 16:2 (1977), pp. 63–75; and Donald Warwick, “Draft Recommendations: Project on Cultural Values and Population Policy,” Papers prepared for the Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences (March 1979), photocopy.
21. In addition to the items cited in the previous note, see Mahmood Mamdani, The Myth of Population Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). On the general rationality of peasants, see James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 35–55, and references cited there. In United States, Department of State, see esp. p. 22: “In the desperately poor circumstances of wide areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America parents may be powerfully motivated to have many children. From the perspective of their own private interests . . . surviving children are highly desirable. . . .”
22. Indonesia is now being touted as a possible first exception—see United States, Department of State, p. 23. But the trends are so far short-lived, and there are disturbing questions, not least of which is whether drops in fertility rates prior to economic development for the poorest depend upon the high level of repression in Indonesia. On the repression, see Indonesia: An Amnesty International Report (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1977).
23. For a responsible attempt to tell us what we need to know, which is the effects of various rates and sizes of transfers, see the study by Leontief discussed below.
24. For the recent levels of assistance transfers, see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Development Co-operation: Efforts and Policies of the Members of the Development Assistance Committee, 1978 Review (Paris: OECD, 1978), which includes statistical annex. To allow everything to depend upon the unaided growth of the economies of the individual poor countries is to beg the question of transnational duties to aid in favor of the affluent countries—see chapter 6. It is essential, however, not to assume that the most effective form of assistance is “aid,” bilateral or multilateral. Trade arrangements designed to slow the growth in the inequality among nations could be significant. Many poor countries’ comparative positions in the world economy are so weak that “free trade” simply leaves them further and further behind. Also see Harrington’s impressions cited in the next note.
25. The logical point is that to will the end is to will the means. The economic point is probably best made by studies of the distortions produced in individual LDCs, and the diversions of their resources away from sustaining the lives of their own people, like Jeffery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975), especially chapters 1 and 2. An explicitly impressionistic argument is given in Michael Harrington, The Vast Majority: A Journey to the World’s Poor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977).
26. See Harden, in Lucas and Ogletree, pp. 125–131.
27. With thanks to the whimsicality of my colleague Paul Vernier, who also taught me, among other things, that every silver lining has a cloud.
28. Major challenges, which I take up in chapter 5, lie in the way of specifying who more exactly the sources of aid ought to be, but on the assumption that the apportionment of duties to aid will to a considerable degree be based upon ability to pay, I can for now refer loosely to the sources of the aid as “the affluent.” The division of burdens between the affluent of the same nation as the deprived and the affluent of other nations, for example, is obviously one major issue, and I discuss it at some length in chapter 6.
Clearly, if subsistence rights are basic rights and if the fulfillment of basic rights takes priority, when a choice must be made, over both the fulfillment of non-basic rights and the satisfaction of preferences to the enjoyment of which people have no right, any unavoidable conflict between the subsistence rights of some people and the preferences or non-basic rights of other people ought to be settled in favor of the subsistence and other basic rights. Positive arguments for this assignment of priorities are given in the next chapter. In the face of the arguments already given to establish that subsistence rights are basic rights, however, most of the burden of proof in the case of this broad objection, as in the case of the earlier narrow population objection, already rests upon the challenger.
29. Harry Walters, “Difficult Issues Underlying Food Problems,” in Food: Politics, Economics, Nutrition, and Research, ed. by Philip H. Abelson (Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1975), pp. 22–28.
30. See Wassily Leontief, Ann P. Carter and Peter A. Petri, The Future of the World Economy: A United Nations Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Obviously no one study settles such matters, and I discuss this one more by way of illustration than of proof. The point is to establish that the case for the broader population objection remains to be made, not to make the empirical case for the opposite view.
31. Leontief et al., p. 3.
32. Leontief et al., pp. 10–11.
33. For further discussion of why the affluent and the poor, and who is meant, see pp. 114–120 below.
34. Leontief et al., p. 11.
35. I have analyzed the disguised moral character of judgments about overpopulation at greater length in “Food, Population and Wealth: Toward Global Principles of Justice,” in Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, 1976 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1977).
5 • AFFLUENCE AND RESPONSIBILITY
1. See above, pp. 94–95 and 104–110.
2. I am grateful to Peter G. Brown for insisting from the beginning that if a right has a correlative duty, the account of the right is incomplete without an account of the duty.
3. Where economic interactions are complex and cessation of activities by any one of several major actors would stop the deprivation of people’s subsistence, it may be difficult to decide who ought to stop. In the destruction of indigenous societies in the Amazon, for example, is it Brazilian government policy, the foreign ranching, or both? On this case, see Shelton H. Davis, Victims of the Miracle: Development and the Indians of Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Anthropology Resource Center, The Geological Imperative: Anthropology and Development in the Amazon Basin of South America (Cambridge, Mass.: ARC, Inc., 1976). Compare Hugh O’Shaughnessy, “What Future for the Amerindians of South America?” Report No. 15 (London: Minority Rights Group, 1973), pp. 20–24; and Roger Fox, Brazil’s Minimum Price Policy and the Agricultural Sector of Northeast Brazil, Research Report 9 (Washington: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1979).
On the principles, I have two suggestions. The principle suggested later in this chapter is probably equally as applicable to avoidance as to protection and aid. Second, and this is the point in the text here, however difficult it may be to decide who should stop, no one is entitled to continue. Therefore, in case of doubt, more rather than fewer operations ought to stop until people are again secure in their food supplies and other subsistence needs.
4. On essential deprivations and accidental deprivations see above, p. 47.
5. See above, p. 56. As explained there, this merely relies upon the way such matters are now organized, on the whole. Exceptions occur now, for instance, the basic economic policies of the government of Indonesia are dictated to it by a consortium of its creditors, known as the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI) and dominated by the World Bank and the governments whose citizens have the largest private investments in Indonesia: the Netherlands, Japan, and the U.S. See Ho Kwon Ping, “Back to the Drawing Board,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 104:17 (April 27, 1979), pp. 86–93. Also see “The Failure of the Berkeley Mafia Technocracy,” Southeast Asia Record, 1:23 (November 9–15, 1979), p. 11, translated by Marie Mohr from the last issue of Matahari (Jakarta), now banned by the Suharto government.
For the full list of categories of duties, see above, p. 60.
6. Thus, I think one can reasonably conclude that no government pursuing a strategy of essential deprivation of its own people can be considered legitimate or deserving of respect or obedience.
7. Questions about duty III-1 and duty III-3 could obviously be fruitfully discussed also. I take issues about duty III-2, however, to be both more controversial and more central to questions of U.S. foreign policy. The arguments in chapter 6 have implications for the relation between duty III-1 and duty III-2.
8. One might dignify this task of explaining which possibly non-universal duties fall upon which individuals and institutions as the beginnings of a theory of responsibility. On the one hand, a theory of rights is needed to explain what rights are, which rights belong to which people, which rights take priority over others, and so on. But just as not all rights are universal—although all basic rights are universal—not all duties are universal either. And we have no a priori guarantee that even the duties correlative to universal rights are themselves universal—on the contrary, no subsistence duties except duties to avoid depriving seem to be universal. So, one needs some explanation of who is and who is not responsible for performing the non-universal duties.
9. This raises the question whether one ought to do one’s duty only if other people also do theirs. The question deserves fuller discussion, but the short answer is: no. People have a right—in the cases we are discussing, a basic right—that one do one’s duty. It is not unfair that one should do one’s part in fulfilling other person’s rights, even if third parties are not doing theirs, any more than it is unfair to punish the criminals who are caught, even if others who have committed the same crimes get away.
It would of course be unfair to expect one to do one’s part if doing it would have no effect unless others also did theirs, since it cannot be a requirement to perform costly actions that are predictably of no benefit. Compare note 11 below.
10. See Michael D. Bayles, Principles of Legislation: The Uses of Political Authority (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), chapter VI and further references there; and Gerald Dworkin, “Paternalism and Welfare Policy,” in Conceptual and Moral Issues in Welfare Reform, edited by Peter G. Brown, Conrad Johnson, and Paul Vernier (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming).
11. The thesis (I) that one need not do more than one’s minimum duty until others have done their minimum duty, must be distinguished from the thesis (II) that one need not do one’s minimum duty unless others do theirs. On the value of coercion in enforcing fairness to bearers of duties, see below, pp. 118–119.
12. How much priority? At the considerable risk of not being very helpful, I am inclined to say: an almost lexical priority. The priority must be very strong in order to express the significance of something’s being a right, but literally lexical priorities yield absurd results—see Brian Barry’s critique of Rawls’s use of lexical orderings in The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1973), chapter 7. Thomas Nagel speaks of rights as “a limited veto”—“Equality,” in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 114. I am not sure how much more definite than saying “almost lexical” and “limited veto” one can be in the abstract, but it is worth further efforts. Douglas MacLean has emphasized the extent of the indeterminacy here.
13. An additional element of the reason for legal requirements is the complexity of the arrangements often needed to insure fairness. For example, if the mechanism for some of the transfers were a general commodity agreement covering a variety of commodities and designed to have a redistributive effect on international transactions from wealthier nations to poorer ones, the people with interests in one of the commodities covered would sometimes find that they had to sell for less than they could have obtained outside the agreement, if they are exporters, or that they had to buy for more than they would have had to pay outside the agreement, if they are importers, because of the price ceilings and floors built into the agreement. But it may not be fair for only the individuals who happen to deal in the richer countries with the commodities that are vital to the poorer countries to bear all the burden borne by their nation. This can sometimes only be prevented by carefully designed transfers within the wealthier nation to those directly hurt by the international agreement from those not directly affected. Therefore, the tax laws need to take this particular kind of fairness into account.
14. Standard utilitarian assumptions about diminishing marginal utility, for instance, yield a fairly obvious argument that might in practice have the same implications. Also, Thomas Nagel has developed a striking notion of “radical inequality” on which I have drawn in what follows—see “Poverty and Food: Why Charity is Not Enough,” in Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices, ed. by Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 54–62. A third, very different, and important argument is the one in T. M. Scanlon, “Preference and Urgency,” Journal of Philosophy, 72:19 (November 6, 1975), pp. 655–669. Although the policy implications of the views of both Nagel and Scanlon would also be similar to the implications of the priority principle, neither of them concludes with me that urgent economic needs (Scanlon) and radical economic inequalities (Nagel) are, strictly speaking, matters of rights and violations of rights, respectively.
15. Compare the finding, already quoted in chapter 1, by James C. Scott for the case of peasants in Southeast Asia: “Village egalitarianism in this sense is conservative not radical; it claims that all should have a place, a living, not that all should be equal.” See The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 40.
16. This is obviously not the whole answer. The next degree of specificity would require criteria for pairing affluent duty-bearers with deprived right-bearers, e.g., nation by nation (We take care of our deprived, and you take care of your deprived.). Chapter 6 considers such a division according to national boundaries.
17. See text and citation above, p. 8.
18. The argument in this section has benefited greatly from the perceptive critique provided by Drew Christiansen of a quite different earlier version of it. For a fresh approach to many of these same issues, and an extremely careful handling of the concept of basic needs, which often seems to inspire sloppy thinking, see Drew Christiansen, “Basic Needs: Criterion for the Legitimacy of Development,” Working Paper (Washington: Woodstock Theological Center, 1979).
19. I am appealing here to essentially the same consideration that John Rawls calls “the strains of commitment”—see A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 175–177.
20. This tie to self-respect and dignity is one reason for the doubt expressed earlier that the arguments from degradation and from fairness are independent of each other.
21. There is always the hypothetical benefit for any property one might live to acquire, but perhaps it can be agreed that this is too slender a reed on which to lean a requirement that people actually deteriorate physically rather than steal.
22. Compare Gilbert Harman’s account of what could be expected to be the content of a compromise between rich and poor in “Moral Relativism Defended,” Philosophical Review, 84:1 (January 1975), pp. 3–22, and, of course, Rousseau’s classic account of the social contract in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.
23. Hence, this principle could have been called the principle of the Pareto-optimality of vital interests: never choose an arrangement that sacrifices vital interests when an arrangement that does not sacrifice any vital interest is available. This seems to me to be far more reasonable as a normative guide than is the standard rule of Pareto-optimality, which this rule contradicts, because the standard rule allows vital interests to be sacrificed in order to preserve trivial interests. The substance of this principle, although not this name or the analogy with Pareto, may have been whispered to me in Manila by Robert E. Goodin.
Peter G. Brown has observed that “the concept of ‘national interest’ lumps together under one word [interest] matters of very different moral standing as if, in all relevant ways, they are homogeneous”—see “. . . in the National Interest,” in Brown and MacLean, p. 163. Economists often create the same mush by calling all sorts of different things “preferences”—this is part of the problem with the ordinary Pareto rule. Distinguishing the vital from the non-vital is one very small step back from abstractions toward reality. For other problems with the Pareto rule, see Amartya Sen, “Utilitarianism and Welfarism,” Journal of Philosophy, 76:9 (September 1979), esp. pp. 479–487.
24. I will, as has become customary, assume a general familiarity with A Theory of Justice and not rehearse points that are clear from a careful reading. Since I will now for the most part be criticizing Rawls’s theory, I am glad also to acknowledge that Part Three of A Theory of Justice has done much to encourage a return by social philosophers to examination of topics like self-respect, dignity, and degradation, which play a critical role in my own argument. Indeed, I think the psychology of self-respect plays a much more significant role in the underlying structure of Rawlsian theory than is usually recognized by those friends and foes of the theory who, as it were, get stuck in the original position—see Henry Shue, “Justice, Rationality, and Desire: On the Logical Structure of Justice as Fairness,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 13:1 (Spring 1975), pp. 89–97. A printer’s error in this article omitted a critical part of my definition of Rawls’s Aristotelian Principle; the second and third lines from the bottom of p. 93 should read: “People tend to desire that people (themselves and others) follow PI.7”
25. R. H. Tawney, Land and Labor in China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 77.
26. I am assuming that the Rawlsian difference principle is to be applied only prospectively: that existing inequalities are to be left in place and only institutions that would otherwise produce greater future increases in inequality are to be constrained by the difference principle. If the difference principle were applied retrospectively and the inequalities already produced by institutions that did not satisfy the difference principle at the time they were functioning were now eliminated, the implications would be radically different from those belonging to the prospective interpretation—and radically redistributive. But I see no evidence that the theory is intended to receive this more egalitarian retrospective interpretation. Such difficulties in application are inherent in, and are strong disadvantages of, strict compliance theory.
For an attempt to formulate a Rawlsian approach to distributions across national boundaries, see Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), Part Three.
27. For an imaginative and provocative discussion of the case for thinking people may sometimes be justified in going to war to obtain subsistence, see David Luban, “Just War and Human Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 9:2 (Winter 1980), pp. 160–181.
28. Rawls, pp. 122 and 139. The unanimity requirement, which is of course not unusual among consent theorists, also smuggles in Pareto optimality. Why is unanimity required unless it is required that no one should lose anything? And why should no one lose anything, however superfluous, to anyone, however deprived?
29. Rawls eliminates this possibility from consideration by assuming only moderate scarcity, pp. 127–128. On the significance of dealing with this by assumption, see note 18 to chapter 1, as well as the next note here.
30. Rawls of course excludes such specific information as whether a fight for survival would likely succeed, by means of the veil of ignorance. This assumption, along with the unanimity requirement and the assumption of moderate scarcity, add force to Ronald Dworkin’s methodological question: why should I willingly abide in this situation by principles that would have been agreed to in a situation so unlike this one? See Ronald Dworkin, “The Original Position,” in Reading Rawls: Critical Studies of A Theory of Justice, ed. by Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 16–19. These are fundamental difficulties for Kantian approaches to moral and political theory.
6 • NATIONALITY AND RESPONSIBILITY
1. Someone who thought that only duties to aid, and neither duties to avoid depriving nor duties to protect, stopped at national boundaries would probably be relying heavily upon some analogue of the distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights criticized above in chapter 2. Thus, confronting duties to aid is confronting the more difficult case.
2. As indicated below, a locus classicus for a description of this kind of view is Book III of David Hume’s Treatise. However, I will in this chapter rarely attribute a particular justification for the priority of compatriots to a particular thinker, because I am less interested in the scholarly originals than in the popular copies of the various arguments. I am primarily trying to articulate the somewhat inchoate reasons that seem to lie behind deep public attitudes that are not usually fully reasoned and are sometimes, of course, mere bigotry and chauvinism. For provocative reflections on the difference between unacceptable bigotry and admirable loyalty, see Samuel Gorovitz, “Bigotry, Loyalty, and Malnutrition,” in Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices, edited by Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 129–142.
3. I used this label at a leadership briefing in 1976, summarized in Who Shall Eat?: Report on An Inquiry Into U.S. Food Policy Options (New York: American Friends Service Committee, 1977), pp. 27–28. The basic notion is long familiar, as will be indicated below. For a lively and important current debate on some of these same issues, see Michael Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 9:3 (Spring 1980), pp. 209–229, and the cited work of the four critics in question (Charles R. Beitz, Gerald Doppelt, David Luban, and Richard Wasserstrom).
4. See, for example, the accounts of nationalism cited in note 13, below, especially Smith. Also see the alternative accounts of the international system formulated and assessed in Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), Parts One and Two.
5. This formulation was suggested by Douglas MacLean.
6. Since one obviously cannot aid all non-compatriots, an adequate account must include principles that serve both the functions served by the priority principle discussed in chapter 5: ranking potential recipients and limiting the extent of duty-bearers’ obligatory transfers, if the need is ever overwhelming (contrary to the contention of chapter 4).
7. Once again, no effort will be made to attribute these stylized views to particular people, but the first—the trustee/adversary—view clearly underlies many discussions of acceptable means for the pursuit of national interests. It even underlies U.S. law concerning human rights and arms transfers, which explicitly permits the supply of U.S. arms to regimes violating the rights of the people under them whenever the arms sales or grants are taken to be in the U.S. national interest. For the law, see Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended, Section 502B. For critiques, see Peter G. Brown, “. . . in the National Interest,” in Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy: Principles and Applications, edited by Peter G. Brown and Douglas MacLean (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1979), pp. 161–171, and see the third section of chapter 7, below.
8. On the complexities of representation, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), especially chapter 9.
9. In the final section of this chapter these are discussed somewhat more fully as “service duties.”
10. Lois B. McHugh, “Summary,” in Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, 96th Cong., 1st Sess., World Refugee Crisis: The International Community’s Response (Comm. Print, August 1979), pp. xi–xxvi. For the observation that the majority of refugees are children, see p. xv.
11. This, however, can probably be dealt with in various ways—see, for instance, Joseph Sneed, “A Utilitarian Framework for Policy Analysis in Food-related Foreign Aid,” in Brown and Shue, pp. 103–128. What Sneed does not tackle is the next issue mentioned in the text.
12. To see that native stock is not necessarily superior, one need consider only some recent cases: the Amin regime in Uganda, the Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea, the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, the Shah’s regime in Iran, and a few others. It by no means follows that intervention of any particular kind is justified. On that difficult issue see Louis Henkin, “Human Rights and ‘Domestic Jurisdiction,’” in Human Rights, International Law and the Helsinki Accord, edited by Thomas Buergenthal (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun & Co. for the American Society of International Law, 1977), pp. 21–40; and the chapters by Thomas Buergenthal, J. Bryan Hehir, and Mark R. Wicclair in Brown and MacLean.
13. Compare, for example, the respective conceptions of nationalism in Karl Deutsch’s Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966); F. H. Hinsley’s Nationalism and the International System (Dobbs Ferry: Oceana Publications, 1973); Hans Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1944); and J. L. Tamon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960). Anthony Smith’s Theories of Nationalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), including Appendix B, “Some Ideological Relatives of Nationalism,” contains a useful attempt at systematically sorting the varieties of nationalism.
14. Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. by Clifford Geertz (New York: Free Press, 1963), p. 109.
15. See, for example, Cynthia H. Enloe, Ethnic Conflict and Political Development: An Analytic Study (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973). Enloe concludes:
Loss of a sense of boundaries, not just territorial but social and psychological, may be at the core of the current outbreak of communal versus nation-state tensions. The fact that the struggle to establish new boundaries for meaningful political action is going on in countries at several different stages of modernization warns against relying on the inevitability of the nation-state or assuming that political development leads to modernity. The mobilization of ethnic groups may reflect the traumas of casting off tradition, but it may also portend innovative political forms for the future, beyond modernity. (274)
I realize that the strength of primordial sentiments is, for the position I am defending, a two-edged sword. While such sentiments may undercut nationalistic sentiments (where the two conflict), they may more effectively than nationalism undercut any sense of transnational duties.
16. See Kant’s famous footnote to the First Section of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals at 401 (Beck, p. 17).
17. For rich suggestions about the deeper questions concerning motivation, see the work of Stuart Hampshire generally and especially his essay, “Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom” in Freedom of Mind and Other Essays by Stuart Hampshire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
18. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part II, Section II (Selby-Bigge, p. 488).
19. Rousseau and Kant, each in his own way, also of course retained a special place for the national community. For this other—roughly, nationalistic—side of each see, for example, Rousseau’s Constitution for Poland, not to mention The Social Contract, and some of Kant’s explicitly political essays, such as “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice’” and The Metaphysical Elements of the Theory of Right.
20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, Book IV (Foxley, p. 196).
21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, Book IV (Foxley, p. 215—translation following Charvet).
22. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 410–411 (Beck, p. 27).
23. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 433 (Beck, pp. 51–52).
24. This utterly fundamental divergence between Hume and Rousseau, on the one hand, and Kant, on the other, about psychological bases for moral conduct is a modern revival of essentially the same debate powerfully and clearly analyzed by Plato in Protagoras, esp. 352–355 (and pursued by Aristotle in terms of acrasia in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII).
25. See the framework given by William K. Frankena in “Recent Conceptions of Morality,” in Morality and the Language of Conduct, ed. by Hector-Neri Castañeda and George Nakhnikian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), pp. 1–24, as well as the following chapter in the same volume, W. D. Falk, “Morality, Self, and Others.” Also compare the position taken by Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) with the critique in Nicholas L. Sturgeon, “Altruism, Solipsism, and the Objectivity of Reasons,” Philosophical Review, 83:3 (July 1974), pp. 374–402, and the alternative approach in Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), esp. chapters 8–12.
7 • RIGHT-GROUNDED DUTIES AND THE INSTITUTIONAL TURN
1. Having mentioned the term in chapter 2 (p. 61), I continued to use it in “The Interdependence of Duties,” in The Right to Food, ed. by Philip Alston and Katerina Tomasevski, International Studies in Human Rights (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), p. 90. I first tried to discuss the division of moral labor systematically, if somewhat murkily, in “Mediating Duties,” Ethics, 98 (July 1988), pp. 687–704. James W. Nickel has valuable recent discussions in “How Human Rights Generate Duties to Protect and Provide,” Human Rights Quarterly, 15:1 (February 1993), pp. 77–86; and “A Human Rights Approach to World Hunger,” in World Hunger and Morality, 2d ed., ed. by William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996), pp. 171–185. For a useful overview of recent work, see Jack Donnelly, “Post-Cold War Reflections on the Study of International Human Rights,” Ethics & International Affairs, 8 (1994), pp. 97–117.
2. For example, John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Book II, Chap. V, Para. 25. Also see, on the intellectual history of subsistence rights, Thomas A. Horne, “Welfare Rights as Property Rights,” in Responsibility, Rights, and Welfare: The Theory of the Welfare State, ed. by J. Donald Moon (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 107–132.
3. See Louis B. Sohn, The Human Rights Movement: From Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms to the Interdependence of Peace, Development and Human Rights (Cambridge: Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School, 1995), pp. 11–17. In particular, see Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Eleventh Annual Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944, reprinted in State of the Union Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, vol. 3.
4. Quoted on p. 5. A recent, highly accurate account of those times is in Kathryn Sikkink, “The Power of Principled Ideas: Human Rights Policies in the United States and Western Europe,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, ed. by Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 139–170. Two good contemporaneous accounts by participants outside the Carter Administration, the first a legislative assistant to a senator and the second a senator, are Mark L. Schneider, “A New Administration’s New Policy: The Rise to Power of Human Rights,” in Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy: Principles and Applications, ed. by Peter G. Brown and Douglas MacLean (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1979), pp. 3–13; and Tom Harkin, “Human Rights and Foreign Aid: Forging an Unbreakable Link,” in Brown and MacLean, pp. 15–26.
5. Charles Frankel, Human Rights and Foreign Policy, Headline Series 241 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1978), p. 38. Frankel wrote here of “the older Lockean rights like free speech or free political association” (39), as if Locke had not mentioned subsistence. Frankel had earlier taken a leave from teaching philosophy and public affairs at Columbia University to serve as assistant secretary of state in 1965–67 in the Johnson Administration; in 1977 he became the first director of the National Humanities Center. Frankel was an important leader in the movement beginning in the 1960s in the United States to return the attention of philosophers to public affairs, and he was taken all the more seriously in some Washington circles because of his experience in the State Department.
While in the early and middle 1940s Franklin, and Eleanor, Roosevelt had supported the balanced view, other U.S. political figures in the late 1940s and 1950s had denigrated economic rights in the same manner as Frankel, lobbying successfully to reverse the position taken by the U.N. General Assembly and split the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which embodied the balanced view, into two separate International Covenants, one that they wanted taken seriously and one that they wanted ignored. In debates before the U.N. Economic and Social Council in 1951, “Mr. Kotschnig (United States) underlined the distinction between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and the economic, social and cultural rights, on the other hand. He pointed out that ‘civil and political rights were of such a nature as to be given legal effect promptly by the adoption of such legislation or other measures as might be necessary. The economic, social and cultural rights while spoken of as “rights” were, however, to be treated as objectives towards which States adhering to the Covenant would within their resources undertake to strive, by the creation of conditions which would be conducive to the exercise of private as well as public action, for their progressive achievement.’ He suggested, therefore, together with several other delegates, that the Council should recommend to the General Assembly to reconsider its decision on including both categories of rights in one covenant. This proposal was adopted by 11 votes to 7” [emphasis added]—see Louis B. Sohn, “Supplementary Paper: A Short History of United Nations Documents on Human Rights,” in The United Nations and Human Rights, Eighteenth Report of the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1968), pp. 105–106.
“States . . . within their resources” means, of course, that there is no duty on the part of rich states like the United States to transfer any wealth to poor states, who must make do in fulfilling economic rights with whatever wealth they happen to have ended up with (in many cases after decades of colonial exploitation). Mr. Kotschnig’s statement is one classic rich-country position, endlessly repeated ever since, especially the nonsensical notion that civil and political rights are fulfilled simply with the passage of a little legislation. This is why no one is ever robbed or murdered in countries like the United States and Britain, which have good legislation! Charles Frankel simply added some new arguments for this basic position.
6. Frankel, p. 40. Frankel did admit: “Indeed, if the United States were to decide not to use the word ‘rights’ to designate goals like full employment and the reduction of want, it would simply separate itself from the outlook and feelings of the mass of mankind” (p. 40); also see 33–35. But he considered this “mild overspeak.”
7. Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers, 1981–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 25.
8. Thomas W. Pogge, “How Should Human Rights Be Conceived?” Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik, 3 (1995), pp. 103–120.
9. The first sentence on p. 91 explicitly denies that these are the only basic rights. Since I was defending against attacks by philosophers (like Charles Frankel, Maurice Cranston, and many others) upon economic rights, it is understandable that my defense of subsistence rights in particular has sometimes been misunderstood as saying that subsistence rights are especially basic, or the most basic. Not so—subsistence is simply no less basic than, say, physical security and social participation. But no more basic.
10. It is a historical point of some significance that the congressional impulse in the 1970s to act to defend human rights abroad was, not an interventionary impulse, but an anti-interventionary impulse, directed against the cynical creation and support of authoritarian regimes favored by the “geostrategic” notions of Henry Kissinger and his school. Many critics of the human rights initiatives have attempted to portray them falsely as the interventionary side. For Kissinger’s general approach, see Walter Isaacson, Kissinger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
11. I have not brought my empirical research up to date for this edition, but questions certainly continue to be raised about the School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. H.R. 2652, introduced by Rep. Joseph Kennedy, proposes closing the SOA; Maryknoll Productions in Maryknoll, N.Y., has made a documentary about SOA called “School of the Assassins.” To this day, the CIA continues to be complicit in murders in Guatemala, most notoriously including the husband of American Jennifer Harbury, whose hunger strikes brought brief media attention to that particular CIA cover-up; it is especially outrageous that after overthrowing the Guatemalan government in 1954 and ushering in decades of death squads, the CIA’s ignorantly out-of-control and murderous meddling in that unfortunate country still blunders on forty years later—see Tim Weiner, “Records Tie C.I.A. Informer to Two Guatemala Killings,” New York Times, May 7, 1996, pp. A1 and A4. In spite of promises to come clean with the public, the CIA continues to cover up its worst disasters—see Tim Weiner, “CIA Is Slow To Tell Early Cold War Secrets,” New York Times, April 8, 1996, p. A6. A particularly good account of self-defeating covert action in Asia is Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York: New Press, 1995). More generally, see Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); and Kathryn Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
12. Thus, it is not obvious that Pogge is correct in describing my account as “maximalist”—see Pogge, “How Should Human Rights be Conceived?” n. 17.
13. In practice, sadly, it is for the foreseeable future highly relevant to focus on how to enable people to recover from the wrongs already done them, specifically, to recover from the violations of rights that have already occurred and to secure themselves against repeat violations in the future. As I have perhaps too pessimistically suggested elsewhere, “Extriction ethics largely constitutes transition ethics”—see “Environmental Change and the Varieties of Justice,” in Global Environmental Change and Social Justice, ed. by Fen Hampson and Judith Reppy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
14. Philip Alston, “International Law and the Right to Food,” in Food as a Human Right, ed. by Asbjorn Eide, Wenche Barth Eide, et al. (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1984), p. 172.
15. Asbjorn Eide, “The International Human Rights System,” in Food as a Human Right, p. 154.
16. I intended to be recommending strategic reasoning about the institutions to implement rights in “Mediating Duties.”
17. James W. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights: Philosophical Reflections on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 54–55. Nickel has developed this point further in “A Human Rights Approach to World Hunger,” pp. 171–85, as I note later.
18. Nickel, Making Sense, p. 13. This is what I call the “substance” of the right.
19. I also argue for concrete, partially empirical approaches to rights in “Thickening Convergence: Human Rights and Cultural Diversity,” in Zur Philosophie der Menschenrechte, ed. by Georg Lohmann and Stefan Gosepath (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, in press).
20. Nickel later writes: “A consequentialist theory of moral rights might interpret importance as a purely axiological notion; a claim would be very important if it were closely connected with a very strong interest or value. I propose, however, to interpret importance as having essential deontological elements. Principles of duty as well as considerations of value will be used in judging importance” (p. 109).
21. Thomas W. Pogge, “How Should Human Rights Be Conceived?” esp. pp. 113–116. The distinction between interactional and institutional was introduced in Pogge’s important 1992 article, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics, 103:1 (October 1992), pp. 48–75. I have found this distinction provocative and fruitful to struggle with. I am not confident that I grasp it correctly, but I do not think that my own views are interactional in his sense, as Pogge does.
22. Pogge, “How Should Human Rights Be Conceived?” p. 113.
23. Ibid., p. 115.
24. Ibid., p. 113.
25. Pogge has an important thesis about negative and positive duties that I do not have the space to take up here. Much too briefly, I think that while he may appear to be contradicting my emphasis on widespread positive duties, his point is at a higher, noncontradictory level. Pogge emphasizes the extremely important fact that those who have some influence on how the world operates are imposing fundamental institutions—global “basic structures” in the Rawlsian sense—upon billions of people with no influence on the terms embodied in the institutions. Insofar as these shared institutions are already enforcing unjust terms upon people, those of us who operate the institutions have a negative duty to stop imposing the unjust institutions. The cessation of the imposition will require exertion and expense, but there is a level at which all these exertions—all this “positive” activity—is satisfying a purely negative requirement: stop imposing unjust terms. That I have had my foot on your neck for so long that it will be uncomfortable for me to get off does not make getting off a positive duty. However, I still want to maintain two theses, which I think are complementary to Pogge, not in conflict with his thesis. First, although the requirement is fundamentally negative, its fulfillment is still constituted in practice by challenging and imaginative institutional reform that involves effort and sacrifice. Second, and perhaps more important, Pogge’s point applies only to institutions that already are shared and have in fact been imposed; these basic structures are extremely important and profoundly affect people’s lives. Nevertheless, in addition to justifying the lifting of the unjust institutions off people’s backs, I am also attempting to justify the creation of new institutions to fulfill rights that have so far gone unfulfilled. Some of what I view as the positive creating of new institutions, Pogge might reasonably take as the elimination or reform of old institutions. But I doubt that it can all be very helpfully so viewed.
26. Nickel, “A Human Rights Approach to World Hunger,” p. 172.
27. This may be what Pogge understands by the “interactional” perspective. Clearly the “interactional” view is individualistic, not institutional. However, Pogge sometimes describes it as if it is the view that one somehow specifies a set of rights and then simply insists that individuals’ duties are whatever they have to be in order to implement the rights specified. I have tried to emphasize, as on pp. 111–112, that no account of rights can be shown to be reasonable without showing that the duties implied are reasonable.
28. A further complication is that the two tests may not be independent of each other: perhaps what it is fair to demand of duty-bearers cannot be established separately and generally but depends to some extent upon which rights would have to go unfulfilled or unacknowledged if fairness were set at one level rather than another. What counted as fair could be affected or influenced without the fair allocation’s simply being defined as whatever must be done to secure the rights.
29. I believe this means that, in Pogge’s terms, neither the interactional nor the institutional can replace the other. They are, I think, complementary.
30. I have considered the currently fashionable critique of rights as encouraging an atomistic or excessively individualistic picture of society in “Thickening Convergence.”
31. For a beautiful example of both how little is obvious and how much a widely knowledgeable philosopher can contribute, see Jeremy Waldron, “A Right-Based Critique of Constitutional Rights,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 13:1 (Spring 1993), pp. 18–51.
32. I have also defended the necessity of duties to protect in “Thickening Convergence.”
33. Nothing, as far as I can see, turns on whether this is considered a kind of protection—so that this duty is a subcategory of a general duty to protect, as in my original scheme—or a separate duty.
34. See Asia Watch and the Women’s Rights Project, A Modern Form of Slavery: Trafficking of Burmese Women and Girls into Brothels in Thailand (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993). Also see Human Rights Watch/Asia, Rape for Profit: Trafficking of Nepali Girls and Women to India’s Brothels (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1995); and Robert I. Friedman, “India’s Shame,” The Nation, 262:14 (April 8, 1996), pp. 11–12, 14, 16, and 18–20.
35. For the U.S. policy of walking by on the other side of the road, see United States, “The Clinton Administration’s Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations” (May 1994) [PDD (Presidential Decision Directive) 25, unclassified version], International Legal Materials, 33 (1994), pp. 798–813; rpt. in Richard N. Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1994), pp. 209–221, Appendix H. Also see Henry Shue, “Let Whatever Is Smoldering Erupt? Conditional Sovereignty, Reviewable Intervention, and Rwanda 1994,” in Between Sovereignty and Global Governance: The State, Civil Society and the United Nations, ed. by Anthony P. Jarvis, Albert J. Paolini, and Christian Reus-Smit (New York: St. Martin’s, in press). For events in Rwanda, see Alain Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, tr. by Alison Marschner (New York: New York University Press, 1995; African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, rev. ed. (London: African Rights, 1995); African Rights, Rwanda: “A Waste of Hope”—The United Nations Human Rights Field Operation (London: African Rights, 1995); African Rights, Rwanda: Killing the Evidence—Murder, Attacks, Arrests and Intimidation of Survivors and Witnesses (London: African Rights, 1996); Philip Gourevitch, “After the Genocide: Letter from Rwanda,” The New Yorker, December 18, 1995, pp. 78–94; and Douglas Jehl, “Officials Told To Avoid Calling Rwanda Killings ‘Genocide,’” New York Times, June 10, 1994. For earlier events and policy in Somalia, see Mohamed Sahnoun, Somalia: The Missed Opportunities (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1994); and John L. Hirsch and Robert B. Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995). Compare Kent De-Long and Steven Tuckey, Mogadishu!: Heroism and Tragedy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994).
36. I have taken this up in a series of recent articles, including “The Unavoidability of Justice,” in The International Politics of the Environment: Actors, Interests, and Institutions, ed. by Andrew Hurrell and Benedict Kingsbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 373–397; “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions,” Law & Policy, 15:1 (January 1993), pp. 39–59; “Avoidable Necessity: Global Warming, International Fairness, and Alternative Energy,” in Theory and Practice, NOMOS XXXVII, ed. by Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew (New York: NYU Press, 1995), pp. 239–64; “Equity in International Agreements on Climate Change,” in Proceedings of IPCC Workshop, Nairobi, July 1994 (Nairobi: ICIPE Science Press, 1995), pp. 385–392; and “Environmental Change and the Varieties of Justice,” in Global Environmental Change and Social Justice, ed. by Fen Hampson and Judith Reppy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
37. For an attempt to work out a methodology, see Henry S. Richardson, “Specifying Norms as a Way To Resolve Concrete Ethical Problems,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 19:4 (Fall 1990), pp. 279–310; and “Beyond Good and Right: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24:2 (Spring 1995), pp. 108–141.
38. In the terms used in the previous section, one must consider both the institutional adequacy of specifying the duties in certain ways and the individual fairness of assigning the duties as specified.
39. I have most recently wrestled with it in Henry Shue, “Solidarity among Strangers and the Right to Food,” in World Hunger and Morality, pp. 113–132.
40. The case for preventive intervention is argued in Shue, “Let Whatever is Smoldering Erupt?” Also see Stanley Hoffmann, “The Politics and Ethics of Military Intervention,” Survival, 37:4 (Winter 1995–96), pp. 29–51. I believe that Hoffmann is wrong specifically about Rwanda (p. 48) but share his general emphasis on “quick early use of force” (p. 44).
41. Duties to aid naturally continue to fall upon those complicit in the violations that made the aid necessary.
42. Alain Destexhe has noted the growing pattern of attempting to use humanitarian assistance to victims of unprevented outrages to cover up failures to prevent them in the first place—Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, chap. 4. Aid is never an excuse for the failed protection that makes it necessary. Many commentators have also made this criticism of the disastrous U.N. policy in Bosnia, which provided food to ravaged areas instead of defending them—see, for example, David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
43. For much kinder words about the nation, and a provocative discussion of the international allocation of duties grounded in basic rights, see David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1995), chap. 3.
44. This fundamental point was powerfully argued by Charles R. Beitz in a book that appeared just as the first edition of this one was in press: Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), part 2.
45. I do not mean to imply that the answer is obvious. Michael Walzer has famously maintained that “it is not true, then, that intervention is justified whenever revolution is; for revolutionary activity is an exercise in self-determination”—Just and Unjust Wars: Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 2d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 89. This was reaffirmed and elaborated, in response to David Luban, in “The Moral Standing of States,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 9:3 (Spring 1980), p. 214. On Rwanda and Bosnia specifically, however, also see Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Rescue,” Dissent, 42:1 [whole no. 178] (Winter 1995), pp. 35–41. For some of the general issues, see Henry Shue, “Eroding Sovereignty: The Advance of Principle,” in The Morality of Nationalism, ed. by Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (New York: Oxford University Press, in press). For reasons why one should not easily assume that economic sanctions are “kinder” than military intervention, see Lori Fisler Damrosch, “The Civilian Impact of Economic Sanctions,” in Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts, ed. by Lori Fisler Damrosch (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), pp. 274–315; and Damrosch, “The Collective Enforcement of International Norms Through Economic Sanctions,” Ethics & International Affairs, 8 (1994), pp. 59–75.
46. Thomas Pogge, “Human Rights as Moral Claims on Global Institutions,” in Lohmann and Gosepath.
47. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 29–30.
48. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 313.
49. I have discussed this more fully in “Thickening Convergence.”
8 • BASIC RIGHTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE
1. John Stuart Mill recognized to some extent the social character of rights—see Utilitarianism, chapter 5 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1957), 66: “To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of”.
2. Valuable discussions of ‘standard threats’ are in David Luban, “The Warren Court and the Concept of a Right,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 34 (1999), 7–37, at 18–21; Charles R. Beitz and Robert E. Goodin, “Introduction: Basic Rights and Beyond,” in Charles R. Beitz and Robert E. Goodin (eds.), Global Basic Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–24, at 10; and Jonathan Wolf, “The Content of the Human Right to Health” in Rowan Cruft, S. Matthew Liao, and Massimo Renzo, Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 491–501, at 495–496.
3. Henry Shue, “Making Exceptions,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 26:4 (2009), 307–22.
4. Benjamin Franta, “Early Oil Industry Knowledge of CO2 and Global Warming,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 1024–1025; doi:10.1038 /s41558-018-0349-9. Also see Neela Banerjee, “Exxon’s Oil Industry Peers Knew about Climate Dangers in the 1970s Too,” Inside Climate News (2015): https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22122015/exxon-mobil-oil-industry-peers-knew-about-climate-change-dangers-1970s-american-petroleum-institute-api-shell-chevron-texaco (retrieved March 20, 2019).
5. Roger Revelle, Wallace Broecker, C. D. Keeling, et al., “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide in United States,” in White House, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment: Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), appendix Y4, 111–133. Also see Kaitlin Sullivan, “U.S. Government Knew Climate Risks in 1970s, Energy Advisory Group Documents Show,” Climate Liability News, March 18, 2019; https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/03/18/national-petroleum-council-climate-change (retrieved March 19, 2019).
6. For example, the original trial judge in Juliana v U.S.A.—the “childrens’ lawsuit” - found a “fundamental right . . . to a climate system capable of sustaining human life”. See Jacqueline Peel & Hari M. Osofsky, “Litigating the right to a sustainable climate system,” OpenGlobalRights, 21 March 2019. https://www.openglobalrights.org/litigating-the-right-to-a-sustainable-climate-system/
7. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Daniela Jacob, Michael Taylor, et al., “Impacts of 1.5°C of Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems,” in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report (2018), 175–311; https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3.
8. For a development and refinement of the argument in support of subsistence as a basic right, see Elizabeth Ashford, “A Moral Inconsistency Argument for a Basic Human Right to Subsistence,” in Cruft, Liao, and Renzo (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, 515–534; and a number of other articles by Ashford.
9. Michael Greenstone and Claire Qing Fan, Introducing the Air Quality Life Index (Chicago: Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, 2018), 4 and 8; https://aqli.epic.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/AQLI-Report.111918–2.pdf. Also see Hilary Brueck, “Pollution Is Killing More People than Wars, Obesity, Smoking, and Malnutrition,” Business Insider, 24 October 2017. And see more generally Anthony J. McMichael with Alistair Woodward and Cameron Muir, Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
10. UN Environment, Global Environment Outlook—GEO-6: Summary for Policymakers (Nairobi: UN Environment, 2019), 2.2.1; doi: 10.1017/9781108639217. Also see Richard Burnett, Hong Chen, Mieczyslaw Szyszkowicz, et al., “Global Estimates of Mortality Associated with Long-Term Exposure to Outdoor Fine Particulate Matter,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115 (38) (September 18, 2018): 9592–9597; doi:10.1073/pnas.1803222115.
11. Nicholas Bakalar, “Air Pollution Contributes to More Than 20,000 Deaths a Year,” New York Times, December 27, 2017.
12. Steven Mufson and Brady Dennis, “Report Finds Widespread Contamination at Nation’s Coal Ash Sites,” Washington Post, March 4, 2019. See more generally UN Environment, Global Environment Outlook—GEO-6: Summary for Policymakers, 2.2.5.
13. Andrew J. Kondash, Nancy E. Lauer, and Avner Vengosh, “The Intensification of the Water Footprint of Hydraulic Fracturing,” Science Advances, 4 (8) (August 15, 2018), 1–8, at 1; doi:10.1126/sciadv.aar5982. Also see Southern Environmental Law Center, “EPA Study Shows Fracking Pollutes Drinking Water,” December 22, 2016; https://selc.link/2h5vph7. The original study is: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States,” EPA-600-R-16–236ES (December 2017); https://www.epa.gov/hfstudy/executive-summary-hydraulic-fracturing-study-final-assessment-2016.
14. Hoegh-Guldberg, Jacob, Taylor, et al., “Impacts of 1.5°C of Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems,” 238–240.
15. United Nations, Human Rights Council, 41st Session [24 June -12 July 2019], Agenda item 3, Climate Change and Poverty: Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, A/HRC/41/39 (Advance unedited version), para. 13. Alston cites a 2015 study reported in The Lancet and the World Bank’s influential 2016 study Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty.
16. United Nations, Human Rights Council, Climate Change and Poverty, para. 87. Also see Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women; Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families; Committee on the Rights of the Child; and Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Joint Statement on “Human Rights and Climate Change”, 16 September 2019. https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24998&LangID=E.
17. Some diverse, valuable sources include Mike Berners-Lee, There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Michael T. Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2019); Rachel Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (New York: Crown, 2019); and David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019). Selected essays of mine from 1992 to 2013 constitute Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). I currently have under way a short book called “Just in Time?: Climate Change and Future Generations.”
18. Henry Shue, “Having It Both Ways: The Gradual Wrong Turn in American Strategy,” in Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint: Critical Choices for American Strategy, edited by Henry Shue, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3–49.
19. Far and away the best book on nuclear weapons remains Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), which contains a profound meditation on the significance of risking extinction.
20. I am grateful to Eugen Pissarskoi for provocatively laying out this contrast—see his “The Controllability Precautionary Principle: Justification of a Climate Policy Goal under Uncertainty,” in Climate Justice: Integrating Economics and Philosophy, edited by Ravi Kanbur and Henry Shue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 188–208.
21. Oppenheimer, Michael, and Bruce Glavovic (in press). “Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low Lying Islands, Coasts and Communities”. In H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, V. Masson-Delmotte, et al., IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, Sections 4.2.3.1.2 and 4.2.3.4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Also see chapter 3, Cross-chapter Box 8. For a study of why the IPCC has consistently under-estimated the danger of dynamic instability in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, see Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson, et al., Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 127–169, esp. 164–168.
22. Claire L. Parkinson, “A 40-y record reveals gradual Antarctic sea ice increases followed by decreases at rates far exceeding the rates seen in the Arctic,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [PNAS] (published online July 2019; open access). Doi:10.1073/pnas.1906556116.
23. Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115 (33) (August 14, 2018): 8252–8259, at 8253; doi:10.1073/pnas.1810141115. For emphasis on the extent of the uncertainty about where any threshold lies, see Richard Betts, “Is Our Planet Headed toward a ‘Hothouse’? Here’s What the Science Does—and Doesn’t—Say,” Washington Post, August 13, 2018.
24. Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 4 and 235.
25. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, abridged and rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017), xx and xxi. Also see Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Philip Blom, Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age Transformed the West and Shaped the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). More generally see John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, with a new afterword (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), esp. 145–147.
26. Chelsea Harvey, “Methane May Not Last Long in the Atmosphere—but It Drives Sea Level Rise for Centuries,” Washington Post, January 13, 2017. For the underlying study, see Kirsten Zickfeld, Susan Solomon, and Daniel M. Gilford, “Centuries of Thermal Sea-Level Rise due to Anthropogenic Emissions of Short-Lived Greenhouse Gases,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114 (4) (January 24, 2017), 657–662; doi:10.1073/pnas.1612066114.
27. Jeroen C.J.H. Aerts, “Climate-Induced Migration: Impacts beyond the Coast,” Nature Climate Change 7 (2017): 315–316; doi:10.1038/nclimate3279. Also see Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 37–53; and Jonathan Watts, “Number in danger from rising sea levels trebles to 300 million,” The Guardian, 30 October 2019.
28. United Nations, Human Rights Council, Climate Change and Poverty, para. 65–66.
29. R. James Woolsey, “Security Implications of Climate Scenario 3: Catastrophic Climate Change over the Next 100 Years,” in Kurt M. Campbell, Jay Gulledge, J. R. McNeill, et al., The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for New American Security, 2007), 79–91, at 85. Woolsey is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Also see Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose.
30. http://trillionthtonne.org.
31. Oliver Geden, “Politically Informed Advice for Climate Action,” Nature Geoscience 11 (June 2018): 378–383; doi:10.1038/s415611-018-0143-3.
32. Anthony Faiola, Marina Lopes, and Chris Mooney, “The price of ‘progress’ in the Amazon,” Washington Post, 28 June 2019. Also see Fred Pearce, “Rivers in the Sky: How Deforestation Is Affecting Global Water Cycles,” YaleEnvironment360, 24 July 2018. https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-deforestation-affecting-global-water-cycles-climate-change (accessed 3 July 2019).
33. Pete Smith, Steven J. Davis, Felix Creutzig, et al., “Biophysical and Economic Limits to Negative CO2 Emissions,” Nature Climate Change 6 (2016): 42–50; doi:10.1038/nclimate2870. Also see Dominic Lenzi, “The Ethics of Negative Emissions,” Global Sustainability 1 (2018): e7, 1–8; doi:10.1017/sus.2018.5.
34. Henry Shue, “Responsible for What? Carbon Producer CO2 Contributions and the Energy Transition,” Climatic Change 144 (4) (2017): 591–596; doi:10.1007/s10584-017-2042-9. Also see Leslie Hook, “Climate Change Fears Spur Investment in Carbon Capture Technology,” Financial Times, March 23, 2019.
35. Henry Shue, “Climate Dreaming: Negative Emissions, Risk Transfer, and Irreversibility,” Journal of Human Rights and Environment 8 (2017): 203–216; doi:10.4337/jhre.2017.02.02.
36. Robert J. Brulle, “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of U.S. Climate Change Counter-movement Organizations,” Climatic Change 122 (2014): 681–694; doi:10.1007/s10584 -013-1018-7. Robert J. Brulle, “The Climate Lobby: A Sectoral Analysis of Lobbying Spending on Climate Change in the USA, 2000 to 2016,” Climatic Change 149 (2018): 289–303; doi:10.1007/s10584-018-2241-z. Michael E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016). Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 169–215. Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications (1977–2014),” Environmental Research Letters 12:084019 (2017): 1–18; doi:10.1088/1748–9326/aa815f.
37. Rainforest Action Network, Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuel Finance Report Card 2019 (March 20, 2019), 7; https://www.ran.org/bankingonclimatechange2019 (retrieved March 22, 2019). Also see Joe Romm, “The Stunning Hypocrisy of JP Morgan and CEO Jamie Dimon on Climate Change,” ThinkProgress, March 21, 2019; https://thinkprogress.org/stunning-hypocrisy-of-jp-morgan-jamie-dimon-on-climate-change-a3fd2ecfbbbd (retrieved March 22, 2019).
38. Jonathan Watts, Jillian Ambrose, and Adam Vaughan, “Oil Companies scrambling to raise output in final ‘fossil fuel harvest’,” The Guardian, 11 October 2019.
39. For principled analyses of strategy, see Simon Caney, “Climate Change and Non-ideal Theory: Six Ways of Responding to Non-compliance,” in Climate Justice in a Nonideal World, edited by Clare Heyward and Dominic Roser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 21–42; Aaron Maltais, “A Climate of Disorder,” in Heyward and Roser, 43–63; and Alex Lenferna, “Divest-Invest: A Moral Case for Fossil Fuel Divestment,” in Kanbur and Shue, Climate Justice, 139–156.
40. An otherwise sometimes generous assessment of Basic Rights by Samuel Moyn does not note the radically critical implications of this conclusion for neoliberal claims—see his Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), esp. 162–172. I was trying to say that what Moyn has recently dubbed ‘economic libertarianism’ is unacceptable—see Samuel Moyn, “We’re in an anti-liberal moment. Liberals need better answers,” Washington Post, 21 June 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/were-in-an-anti-liberal-moment-liberals-need-better-answers/2019/06/21/5f276b26-91f7-11e9-b72d-d56510fa753e_story.html?utm_term=.a68aa2c01163. (accessed 3 July 2019)
41. Rainforest Action Network, Banking on Climate Change, 10–12 and 31.
42. Albert Camus, The Plague (1947), translated by Robin Buss (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 195.
43. See Dieter Helm, Burn Out: The Endgame for Fossil Fuels (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017); and Carbon Tracker Initiative, 2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming, September 10, 2018, https://www.carbontracker.org/reports/2020-vision-why-you-should-see-the-fossil-fuel-peak-coming (retrieved March 25, 2019). Also see Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation, A New World: The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation (International Renewable Energy Agency, 2019); https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/Jan/A-New-World-The-Geopolitics-of-the-Energy-Transformation (retrieved March 25, 2019).
44. Chris Mooney and Brady Davis, “In Blow to Climate, Coal Plants Emitted More Than Ever in 2018,” Washington Post, March 25, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/03/26/blow-climate-coal-plants-emitted-more-than-ever/?wpisrc=nl_green&wpmm=1 (retrieved 31 October 2019).
45. David Pomerantz, “Utility Carbon Targets Reflect Decarbonization Slowdown in Crucial Next Decade,” San Francisco: Energy and Policy Institute, 25 June 2019. https://www.energyandpolicy.org/utility-carbon-targets/ (accessed 2 July 2019); and Dan Tong, Qiang Zhang, Yixuan Zheng, et al., “Committed emissions from existing energy infrastructure jeopardize 1.5°C climate target,” Nature (2019), doi:10.1038 /s41586-019-1364-3. Published online, 1 July 2019. For an accessible account of the significance of this Nature study, see Chris Mooney, “Existing fossil fuel plants will push the world across a dangerous climate limit, research finds,” Washington Post, 1 July 2019.